My LfA (Learn from Anywhere) Journey From 6800 Miles Away
It was the second week of March, when we finally learned that BU would be sending us home after spring break. I received the news while having breakfast with my friends in Miami, where we hoped to have the greatest-ever spring break after a long, stressful semester. It’s not that we weren’t aware of COVID-19 when we began the trip. Rather, we wanted to pretend that a global pandemic wasn’t happening. We were scared. We feared that the virus would one day come near us and affect our lives if we were to acknowledge its presence. Well, it came to us anyway.
Making the decision
As soon as the email reached our inboxes, the six of us started calling our parents. Facing the virus, the so-called “adults” we used to define ourselves didn’t sound accurate anymore. We didn’t know what to do. None of us are from Boston and the university wanted us to fly straight home from where we were, so we needed to figure out everything from such an unfamiliar setting. Unlike my American friends, my journey back home to South Korea was not so easy. I had all my belongings back in my dorm on Bay State Road that I had gathered all around the world over the past five years of studying abroad. In addition, BU originally wanted to resume classes in April, which didn’t help the situation, either. I hadn’t been back home since I arrived in Boston two years prior to that, so it wasn’t as simple as packing the necessities and flying out of the city. I was away from home by half the world. That being said, I decided to go back to my dorm. At that moment, when all my friends were traveling straight to their home states, going back to Boston felt almost like stepping into a fire. I didn’t even have access to masks, and how the virus gets transmitted was also very unclear to me.
Back in Boston
When I got back from Miami on Friday, March 13th, I saw many students moving out of their dorms, as their families waited in the cars parked outside. The dining halls had a smaller number of visitors but it still felt like a normal day. However, things started to change drastically over the next couple of days. Before then, my building was often crowded with visitors. My neighbors and I always competed to use the one bathroom all of us shared on our floor. Suddenly, I was there all alone. There was not a single footstep outside my room and the streets were empty. I wasn’t sure if this was the same lively city that I fell in love with. What saddened me more was the thought of my family and how worried they might have been about me from 6800 miles away, with every news outlet talking about the growing number of cases in the United States.
Getting home
It was an early morning after the weekend when my mom urgently called me on her mission to bring me home. We immediately booked the earliest flight we could get at the moment, that was leaving in 20 hours after the phone call. The whole process was stressful, yet incredibly simple. I was praying to be able to go home ever since I started college but I was always hesitant because it would cost too much. I wanted to spend my money elsewhere, trying new things and visiting other countries. On that day, I didn’t have that choice anymore, but I didn’t complain.
Even though packing in less than a day was the most challenging thing I ever had to do, I am so glad and relieved that I was able to move back to Korea that night. I wouldn’t have been able to fly out of Boston, had I not travelled home that week. Things only got worse from there as the flights began to skyrocket in price, with people not being able to get to where they needed to be. I also had the luxury of not having to quarantine because it was earlier into the pandemic.
Remote Learning Experience
While taking all my classes asynchronously, I was given so much time to myself as well as the freedom to create my own schedule. Of course, challenges and disadvantages also followed. Professors often forgot about my existence and left me out of team assignments, only for me to find out about it after the group project was due, in a class recording that was posted two weeks too late. Class participation and presentations were no way near possible in my afternoon classes with a 14-hour time difference between Korea and Boston. One time, I stared at a black screen for an entire hour when my classmates were placed into breakout rooms during a recorded lecture. COVID-19 has definitely changed each of our education experiences, but I personally wasn’t sure what I was getting out of it in the beginning.
Nine months later, we’re still trying to adapt to online learning. This semester, I started to communicate more with my professors, advisors and classmates outside the class. One of my professors offered to have one-on-one weekly meetings so that my learning could be interactive in some way. I even followed the Eastern Standard Time instead of mine so that I could stay up for some of my favorite classes. With at least one more semester of online classes ahead of me, I am afraid, uncertain and frustrated as a lot of us have been.
Despite all that, I’m still hopeful for the connections I’ll build with my professors and classmates online, and the meaningful conversations I can have with my friends over our regular video chats. Most importantly, I’m thankful for the time I get to spend and cherish with my family for the first time in a long while.
By Hyerim Seo
