Roughly divided, I currently have two types of people in my studies. Type one gets a dreamy, awe-inspiring glimmer in his eyes when it comes to words like lecture hall, face-to-face events and even cafeteria meals, and he talks about the flat-share parties that are finally supposed to take place after the exams as if it were about parties in Gatsby's villa. I'm in the second semester. Anyone who started with me has been studying under the big C for almost a year and has probably never been in a building at the university or in a shared apartment other than their own. Type two, tending to be a few years older, stands by, slightly amused, and thinks behind a mildly precocious smile: as if. As if “discussions” in seminars only get better because they have people in the same room again, and as if that The problem wouldn't be that half of them never readwhat she's talking about and the other half doesn't dare to say anything.
When I tried to study for the first time after graduating from high school, I was type one myself and back then, after thirteen years of Wikipedia presentations and required reading, my expectations of university life were huge.
Free and grown-up, that's what I'd finally become as a student.
How frustrating it must be to carry these expectations around with you for a year longer while you sit alone in your room in front of a screen and get to know lecturers and fellow students merely as zoom tiles.
You can roughly imagine it and read it off from the fact that at many universities the demand for psychological support has increased enormously.
Of course, the longing for what came before is great.
Quite demotivating mediocrity
And yet it seems to me as if the pre-corona state has gained a somewhat too halo-bright radiance over the past few months in this area of society as well. Even at the universities, not everything was so great before that. Because the “The Best Time of Life” story about student life has long included the half-funny anecdotes about professors who haven't changed their lectures since switching from Overhead to PowerPoint, and about homework that nobody reads anyway . (A friend of mine once handed in a term paper that broke off in mid-sentence because he was going to change universities and he didn't care if he passed. He passed.)
It quickly sounds as if you long for earlier when you now start with mass lectures in which people at most ask whether something is relevant for the exam. A previous one that I didn't experience at all and that supposedly ended in a place of horror that I only know as the flat-share party “Bologna” of the Viennese band Wanda. What I got to know a little at two German universities is pretty demotivating mediocrity. I was able to do a bachelor's degree in politics and economics without any problems, without ever having a single economic theorist. At the beginning I tried to break out of the curriculum with extracurricular events and to tinker with my studies. But soon the reassuring ticking off the compulsory courses and the increasing count of credit points corrupted me.The nasty pleasant thing behind the bad word "schult" is that you get a bit high from the many reviews and get the feeling that you are doing everything right.