Author: Erica Lee
During the Fall 2020 semester, I found several advantages to studying at home and online, mainly that I had fewer housekeeping tasks to do, and therefore I could focus on my studies more. However, although I had my daily chores off my mind, there were other factors from online schooling that replaced the stress from housekeeping. The stress and anxiety primarily came from how I was interacting with others and studying online, as I was gradually becoming less sociable and motivated.
The lack of physical human interaction between myself and other students, TAs, and professors made me struggle to communicate. For example, since all of my classes did not require students to turn their cameras on, the whole semester passed by with dark blank screens across my screen. When it was time to present or make teams for a project, I felt anxious speaking because I felt awkward and nervous. My anxiousness came from small things like ‘what if when I start talking, someone else starts talking?’, ‘I wonder how they are reacting to my presentation?’, etc. My solution was to just assume that everyone else is as awkward and nervous as I am behind their cameras and also to overcome my fear of embarrassment online.
Furthermore, my failure to recognize the significance of online learning made me less motivated to work. Receiving lectures and interacting with professors through my laptop felt as if it was an informal interaction, thus I took my studies less seriously. Moreover, some professors allowed students to miss the live lecture and watch the recording, which also influenced me to miss some classes to get more sleep. The most stressful part was overcoming the threshold of ‘informality’, where I set concrete goals such as ‘waking up 30 minutes before class and ‘attend the lecture until the end’ or ‘participating and answering questions by unmuting, instead of using chat’.
Overall, I tried to adapt to the new online environment by convincing myself to be comfortable during interactions and pushing myself to take online classes as seriously as in-person classes. Although these methods work out for now, I hope to find better solutions to my new online stress.
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