Twenty people in the seminar room, but only 19 bright screens.

While we're clicking through today's presentation, my fellow student Peter Wiedenau is rummaging around in his bright green folder to my right.

He printed out all the material, carefully marked and labeled it.

Now he patiently spreads out the jumble of papers in front of him.

Seeing this, I grunt a bit, look over at my friends and sneer.

"What's he doing here?" I think to myself - and catch myself squinting at his notes.

In my distraction, I completely missed what we were actually talking about today.

With his gray hair, the bike helmet and the lack of a laptop, he really stands out from the rest of us.

Peter is 61, about 20 years older than our lecturer, he has a degree in biology and was forced into early retirement by his company.

Suddenly he was faced with a hole that somehow had to be filled.

During the day he was initially alone at home, his wife is still a few years away from retirement, and his two children are studying.

"I'm not someone who likes to snuggle up on the sofa with a bag of chips and relax," says Peter.

He has always been interested in English and history, so he decided to enroll at the University of Düsseldorf.

I'm 41 years younger than Peter and, unlike him, I love banging myself on the sofa with a bag of chips.

Especially when I actually have lectures and seminars.

My condition is called “procrastination” and many will know it.

It's a typical student disease, my whole circle of friends is affected.

I somehow get through all my courses, even with good results.

It's just that the days of absence allowed are more and more exhausted, as is my enthusiasm and motivation.

You can't blame everything on the pandemic

"Mansplaining" is a topic in our course today - not only in the student bubble for years it has been hotly debated.

The more conservative among us like to show that we don't care much for feminism;

the left-wing student camp, on the other hand, often wants to aggressively prove how wrong everyone else is.

In the midst of this discussion, which resembles a battlefield, Peter is asked to explain his view of mansplaining, a phenomenon he had never heard of before the course.

We're really excited to see what the man with the gray hair has to say about it.

And then he surprises us all: not only can he define the topic much better than we can, his contribution is also balanced and reassuring.

In the end I feel guilty - the arrogance.

After three semesters of online university, I am now sitting in the seminar room next to Peter and wondering when everything went wrong.

When did I lose my enthusiasm for my subject?

When did I stop looking forward to classes?

My studies started in the middle of the pandemic.

Meetings on zoom, no lecture hall, no freshman week, in the fourth semester for the first time in a full seminar - these are now the old camels of the plagued Corona students.

All of this has definitely contributed to my disliking my studies.

But somehow I'm also tired of blaming everything on the pandemic.

After all, normality has returned to the campus in the meantime.

But the spark hasn't jumped over with me yet.

Why is that?