This year has been a huge shock for everyone. The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China affected many people, and it rapidly evolved into a global pandemic, which we are still fighting for the foreseeable future.
Once the fight is over, this pandemic will not be forgotten, and it will make history. We will tell our children about the year 2020 and how a global pandemic turned the world upside down. As COVID-19 came, some of us lost potential experience. However, this is not something that we should complain about, rather, it is something we can reflect on instead.
With the outbreak in March, a lot of us experienced a unique summer that lacked our normal activities and responsibilities. COVID-19 hit as students were trying to find and secure summer jobs resulting in hundreds of unemployed students collecting government financial aid. The lucky few who did secure a job or internship had to move to online platforms. For those of you who did find a job, you should be proud, whatever it was; finding a job in a pandemic is not easy.
Summer is typically seen as a time for vacations and relaxation with friends and family. However, quarantine prevented us from even seeing or checking up on those outside our immediate household, let alone travelling to new places. We missed out on precious moments like seeing our new baby cousin, going to the beach with friends or having picnics with those closest to us.
Now, this is all very generalized; there are some specific things that I have lost from COVID-19. The end of my first year of university was not what I expected. I had to pack up and move out of residence within a couple of days notice, and then finish my first year completely online.
This was a hard change, as many of you probably understand, because I had to start learning online. In addition, leaving residence and moving away from my friends was heartbreaking due to the sudden nature of everything and the reality that I had to move away from my Laurier home.
Now, Iโve lost the experience of being in lecture halls on campus with my peers and professors. Having classes online is a big change, and logging into Zoom every day for my courses is very different from sitting in a lecture hall and spending time on campus throughout the week. I could say that the experience of being in class is lost, but classes are still running, so I am just losing the experience of being on the Laurier campus.
We may have lost many of the usual university experiences this year, but we also gained experiences we otherwise wouldnโt have. We now know how to take courses online and how to work Zoom.
Donโt get me wrong, living through this global pandemic is not easy or always fun, but we can flip the view on how we see these experiences and find the positives in them! Perhaps we did not lose anything at all, but instead, we gained the experience of living in a completely different world. One thing is for certain, this year will not be forgotten!
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