Adapting to the sudden changes…
Due to COVID-19, I have had to make changes to my career journey and my daily life as you may have had to as well. I managed to get around 10ish out of 30 hours of my placement complete, which although isn’t half, I’m still grateful I had the chance to get some experience. I heard some students had done fewer hours or hadn’t even started their placement, so I feel like I am lucky in some sense.
Now that we are all locked up inside and studying from home there has been a lot of adjustments needed to be put in place by my university. All my lectures have now been moved to online and exams have been cancelled. You may think I must be so bored chilling… no no no….. I am still required to complete 5 assignments! I didn’t even have that many to complete before the lockdown. So yeh, I do consider it very unfair and I won’t lie I’m struggling. I’m quite a stress head and I get anxious easily so having all these assignments on my mind every day is driving me nuts! But at the same time when I think of the current situation, my family and I haven’t been affected as greatly as other families will have and so I’m grateful for that. Remember, we must think about the positives of life : )
While I haven’t been so good at the online learning in terms of listening to lectures, I do plan to listen to them once I get my assignments out the way. My assignments are my priority right now as these will still count towards my end of year mark and degree. I guess one strength from moving to online learning is that I have been able to organise and prioritise the most important parts of my university work.
I have tried to keep a bit of a structure and plan of what I will do each day, and when I should move on to the next task, but honestly… it’s hard. I feel like with the whole atmosphere around the world, it probably has affected my mood too.
One positive thing is that I plan to improve my digital skills during this lockdown. As part of one of my UCIL assignments, I am required to create a short video that presents a current hot topic in biological science. This is something I’ve never done before, so I do feel a bit nervous about it. However, my older sister is better at technology than me and I know I have her to ask for help when I get confused with the technical side. I emailed my unit lead to asking her for suggestions on software’s previous students have used. She mentioned: PowerPoint, Prezi, and Zoom. I look forward to learning more about how to use these to improve my digital skills whilst at the same time getting my assignment done! I recently used Zoom for the first time to engage with my online lab classes, so I do feel that I am learning digital skills even in lockdown.
I know it’s hard right now, but I’ll feel proud once all these assignments are over and hopefully this will be shown in my grades too. I look forward to returning back to university for my 3rd year and carrying on with my career journey.
