“Getting an Education” in Isolation
The coronavirus pandemic has forced students to rethink their definition of what it means to “get an education.”
If you’ve never had a conversation in a library at 2 AM, intellectual or otherwise, have you ever really been a student? I once spent two hours with others discussing the existence of free will; almost as much time was later devoted to discussing which sauce from McDonald’s provided a better chicken nuggets eating experience. We proceeded to sleep at 6 AM and fail our exam at 9 AM, only to later discover that our saving grace would be that most of the class had also failed. Syndrome’s phrase from The Incredibles, “and when everyone’s super, no one will be,” seems aptly used here, but I digress.
As I’ve progressed through life, and people have begun to sleep and wake at earlier hours (ungodly ones if you ask me, especially in healthcare), the frequency of these conversations has seemed to wane, but the impact of the friendships formed seemingly never does. With the “dawn of the coronavirus,” we have seen these late-night discussions, along with so many of the other simple pleasures of life, thrown out the proverbial window. Despite the blow to student morale that a lack of these conversations has dealt, do these discussions actually provide some form of educational value? I would argue that yes, they do — they are just as important as the specific knowledge we acquire as students.
If you’re like me, you’ve spent the majority of the past few weeks in front of a computer and/or phone screen, reading textbooks, watching videos and definitely not using social media. The first week of virtual education was probably the most productive week of my first year of medical school thus far. With no one around to distract me, I managed to finish my curricular work, my school-related extracurriculars (of which there are now painfully too few), and I even managed to get back into playing piano, reviving one of the many hobbies I’ve let fall by the wayside over the past few years. The pre-clinical curriculum of medical school has thus provided the perfect example of a form of education where not much about the knowledge provided has changed — I am still able to “attend” lecture, navigate problem-based learning with my peers via structured, scheduled Zoom sessions, and learn anatomy (albeit virtually) via the Microsoft Hololens. Even before most of us quarantined ourselves, most medical schools had stopped requiring students to attend lectures, giving them access to recordings; some schools have gone so far as to suggest eliminating them entirely.
It stands to reason, then, that my education should be all but unaffected. With access to all of the required knowledge, along with the ability to converse virtually with others via text and video-chat, I should still be receiving what some like to call a “higher education.”
I’ve asked myself many times what comprises a “good” higher education. Is it defined by the books I’m supposed to read? Is it determined by my access to the knowledge I should be learning? Or is it my professors that characterize that quality of my experience? These three pieces are, no doubt, essential to the completion of our puzzle, and they are pieces which I would argue are still present for most students as we attend classes virtually from the comfort of our own homes. These are the attributes of education that often come to mind when we ask ourselves why we opt to accept the six-figure price tag that so often accompanies colleges and graduate schools — this is what much of the money we pay goes towards, after all. And yet, even with the presence of these crucial aspects of learning, something still seemed amiss.
Monday of my second week home passed, and I discovered that my newfound focus had nearly vanished overnight. The all-too-familiar occasional distractions, conversations, and jokes cracked around study space tables are often what kept me going; the hour I spent almost every day at the ping pong table served to help blow off the necessary steam to keep working. There was no one to bounce ideas off of, no one to challenge me when I said something stupid, and no one to yell at me when I spent too much time wandering aimlessly around the building. What had begun as a mere absence of sound had grown to become deafening silence, as seconds turned to minutes and minutes became hours. There was no Sharbel, Will, or Adel arguing like there so often was when I was an undergraduate, and I couldn’t hear Sabrina’s laugh from halfway across the building, Peter making fun of Steve, Kayley snoring, or Maddie’s music, all sounds I normally tuned out completely when I felt like I needed to focus.
In theory, the lack of these “distractions” should have made me more productive. In practice, it did anything but. I could no longer pop into the next room to ask friends a question, argue with someone over a topic that had come up in lecture, or simply listen in on conversations that, though they might not have added to my medical knowledge, served to force me to re-think a preconceived notion or thought of mine. This, I think, is the true value of a higher education; it may not be exactly what we pay for, but I think it is what value we actually gain from it, and why we continue to pay seemingly exorbitant prices (well—and for the degree itself). It is the personal connections we form, the discussions we have, and the camaraderie of experiences that we walk away from our education with. This holds true for student relationships with faculty as well — our mentors are often our staunchest supporters and most powerful motivators. In the words of my friend Sharbel: “I often learned more from the conversations with students after class than I did from sitting through the classes themselves.”
Yes, having these discussions virtually is still possible to some extent. I re-wrote this post almost four times before finalizing its structure — and the sixty minute conversation I had with Sharbel before I went to bed is part of what allowed me to externalize these thoughts onto your screen. But this implies that a relationship has already been formed and cultivated — an assumption that does not hold true if that path of education is a virtual one from start to finish. Imagine learning from home with no friends to discuss the material you are learning with (an all too real scenario should students remain unable to resume a physical education near summer’s end).
I have, of course, kept in touch with friends in isolation, and I enjoy the daily virtual discussions I have with each of them. What I truly miss, however, are the conversations I had with those whom I enjoyed the company of but am not necessarily close to on a personal level; amusing and often unrelated to schoolwork, this banter still brought about a great deal of personal growth. The enjoyable organic chaos brought about by individual worlds colliding is gone, replaced only by structured discussion. The most fulfilling part about virtual education as it currently stands has not been the medical knowledge I have acquired, but rather the spontaneous projects I have worked on with others over the past few weeks (this COVID-19 bot/visualization with my friend Ellen, a collection of upbeat stories of triumph from others, and programming modules for a new data science course with Ellen and Carson). I think the majority of my peers would agree that the most fulfilling part of their virtual education as it currently stands is the aspect from which they get to help out — organizing task runs, blood drives, helping with contact tracing and data analysis, among other activities, at least from the perspective of medical students. In a way, it serves to add to the humanistic side of our education, given our current inability to directly interact with patients.
In essence, the knowledge portion of our education hasn’t changed much. What has changed, though, is the connections we typically form and the subsequent usage of these connections to throw ideas around and build off of one another. It is these connections that define our education, and while we may continue to maintain them virtually, there is so much we lack when we cannot tangibly interact. Without these connections, occasional side chatter, and sometimes productive conversation, all we’re doing is absorbing knowledge; we no longer truly need schools for this task, given the extensive reach of the internet at our fingertips. While it is not impossible to form these connections in other places, by reaching out virtually to your peers or by meeting others at a library or cafe (though not right now!), a university brings together hundreds of individuals with a variety of experiences. The network that this creates results in unbridled opportunity, conversation, and life lessons, and it is this network that allows us to walk away from our education as better people.
Do I mean to say that a temporary virtual curriculum hasn’t had its perks? Most certainly not — being able to watch my lectures after the fact at various speeds and learn at my own pace has had a huge impact on my ability to synthesize information, but it is difficult to actually consolidate and recognize the value of this information without the interactions I normally enjoy with various peers and other faculty. The point I am making may seem like an obvious one (because it likely is), but it is still something that we should be increasingly cognizant of after we resume our hectic lives post-quarantine. In our rush to get things done, I think that so many of us are quick to push people away when we need to study; I am as guilty of this as the next person. In the moment, as busy college or graduate students with so many assignments and activities, we take the jokes we crack with one another for granted, the late-night banter as commonplace discussion that we are quick to eventually disregard. These are, however, the memories that we will remember when we look back with fondness to the different years that have comprised our education. We should cherish these interactions as they come, knowing that they might no longer influence our lives the following day. It has taken a pandemic and what feels like the literal end of the world to make me fully realize this, and I hope that when life resumes a semblance of normalcy we will try to make more time for those that we care about, hopefully understanding that the value of an education comes from the connections and memories we form in the process of acquiring knowledge.
Disclaimer
I recognize that there are a variety of cyber-schools and online universities that do an excellent job of providing their students with the knowledge that they will need to thrive and succeed. I simply wish to highlight that, as a college graduate and current medical student, I would have had a very different experience and education had I not made the connections I did and had many of the conversations that I had. It is possible to form this network and have these discussions outside of physical universities, but they are where I personally had the fortune of doing so.
