While looking out of the window was already a popular sport among students in the past, it is even more so in the online university, I think with a view of the Danube, which bathes in the valley next to me in a smeary gray. With every minute new landscapes move in front of my ICE window: orchards, pine forests, small villages, dry fields. Many temptations to forget the time and let your eyes wander, but our lecturer has divided our seminar group into discussion groups at this moment and I can already hear the first shy “Hello, have you read the text?” In my headphones. I force my attention to the screen and after ten seconds of silence I turn on my microphone and force myself to say: "Hey, yes, do we want to start with the first question then?" Ten seconds later I was answered by an unknownsoft sounding voice: "Yes, I think that's good.".
The scene dates from June 2021. I had been studying sociology in Vienna for around four months. The semester break is now and the review of the digital semester is extremely mixed. I've already written a few exams and worked through hundreds of pages of reading. I'm pretty happy with my studies, only one thing is a bit strange: I only know my fellow students by the names on the small gray zoom boxes and I've never seen the university from the inside.
I know the magnificent university buildings at the Votive Church in Vienna from cycling past, but they are about as foreign to me as the town hall or the parliament building.
Places where people probably do important things that elude the reality of my life.
I moved to Vienna in the winter lockdown.
During this time, “Uni” meant for me: Sitting at my desk in my room and reading texts.
A few videos were added each week, lecture streams in which the content of the texts was taken up and expanded.
Whether I watched them live or a few hours or days later and then mostly at 1.5 times the speed - I could decide for myself.
What would actually be normal?
Compared to school, that's great: We are completely responsible for ourselves and can structure ourselves.
But in the online university all temporal and spatial constants are disappearing.
Without fixed points in student life, everyday life will not develop and we wander between doing too much for university and doing nothing at all without knowing what would actually be normal now, what would be is actually expected of us.
Freedom goes hand in hand with a little devil in your ear that whispers to you in free minutes: "You could actually watch the last lecture while you're waiting for the subway anyway".
You have to learn to switch off properly.
It doesn't really help that we don't know each other and can't talk to each other.
In one of the seminars I attended, maybe five people turned on their cameras in video chat.
I guess, you usually make friends with a few fellow students, discuss texts and exercises, or sometimes help each other when a submission has been calculated a little tightly.
In any case, I hope that it will be like this in face-to-face teaching - because studying as a one-woman mission is, as one would say here in Vienna: a little bit slow.
Friends are literally passed on
I got to know the few other sociology students I know through friends.
One thing stands out: Those of us who have only started in the last semesters are told by mutual friends with a "This is Laura, she is also studying sociology and is also looking for friends - write her, here is her number" literally conveyed.
All the others have already found their way into university life in the few semesters in attendance.
It's pretty difficult for me to introduce myself as a student or even a sociology student or at all: to see myself that way.
How can I call myself that when I don't even know what kind of group I belong to?
What if I have never entered the institute building?
When I tell my parents what my studies are like, it is rather alien to them.
For them, at least half of the study consisted of social interaction with fellow students and lecturers.
And of course I complain about the toxic freedom that studying online brings with it.
Whole university days in the café
But in the end it is also a freedom. Especially when the rest of life returned due to increasingly loose pandemic measures. How else could we have decided to postpone the afternoon lecture to the next morning and instead go swimming with friends on the Danube? How could we have spent whole university days in the café and drink as many melanges one after the other as the wallet allows? How could we have gone on vacation in the middle of the semester to watch the lectures on a terrace with a view or with old friends and family? And how else would it have been possible to combine a part-time job and university in a relaxed manner?
The "correct" study, which may be possible again from the next winter semester, will definitely be another change for us Corona freshmen.
What I will definitely miss: To be able to mute this one macho in the seminar who always knows everything better and surpasses himself in slightly inappropriately used jargon with one click.
Pauline Evers
(19 years old) is a freshman in sociology at the University of Vienna.
She also works on film sets, in the falafel snack bar and every now and then for the FAZ. In Vienna, she looks forward to seminars in attendance and the long-distance bus to Sarajevo.