Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
As students engage with their final year of college, the reality of online learning and internships takes its toll on their education.
Story by Kenneth Duncan
When Western Washington University was forced to suspend all in-person classes due to COVID-19, Alifore Noreen couldn’t have been more pleased.
While working towards her environmental science degree, an undiagnosed sleeping disorder caused Noreen to miss many of her in-person classes. A remote approach allowed her to catch up with lectures that previously didn’t work with her unique set of circumstances. And with every school in the country making the leap to online learning, what was formerly out of reach fell right into her lap.
However, it wasn’t all perfect.
The obvious pitfalls of a remote education had her feeling like she was receiving an abridged education. Online labs were leaving her scrambling, YouTube videos replacing vital instructor interaction and feeling a strange disconnect from her field during her last year at Western. Worst of all, her study abroad program in Iceland was canceled, a trip predicated on the quality of meaningful, in-person interaction and data gathering.
“I wound up writing a synthesis essay derived from other people’s research,” Noreen said. “Which was great, but it’s definitely not the hands-on experience that I was looking for, of traveling and experiencing different cultures and talking to people.”
Upperclassmen throughout the United States have found themselves dealing with this exact dilemma as they face a fully remote final year. COVID-19 and the subsequent transfer to remote learning have drastically altered the college experience. What was once an opportunity to forge career skills, memories and vital professional connections is now an exercise in impersonal monotony. In addition, the development of online internships has left both employers and students scrambling to somehow bring the hands-on experience to interns’ homes all while attempting not to lose any of what makes the experience beneficial for both parties.
Every patient has become a potential biohazard, with what were once simple day-to-day tasks becoming shrouded behind a wall of red tape, masks and hand sanitizer.
Freshman enrollment has decreased an average of almost 13% across public, private and community colleges according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. As incoming freshmen and other underclassmen consider enrollment, they have the ability to wait things out, with general undergraduate requirements and lecture classes lending themselves more naturally to a remote year. For them, it’s simple; wait a year or two for the world to open up again and knock out less interesting classes at home.
But for college seniors across the country, the choice between finishing their undergraduate work and waiting for quarantine to end means sacrificing their most critical year of classes.
But what happens to students when that transition can’t replicate their major? What happens when a student isn’t able to participate in what their major demands of them on the most basic level, through no fault of their own?
Annie Bluher, a double major in psychology and exercise science and senior at Central Washington University, had her college experience cut short in March. With the school reporting over 230 cumulative cases of COVID-19 as of Jan. 7, she feels hesitant to actively engage with subjects like she used to.
“Before everything got shut down, I was supposed to be fitness-assessing people,” Bluher said. “I was supposed to do it in the spring, but it was canceled completely. Then I heard that they were going to do it in the fall, but I pushed it back to winter because I didn’t feel comfortable doing it in person.”
Like Noreen, Bluhers made the move to entirely asynchronous classes. But unlike Noreen, the lack of real in-person connection has taken its toll on her lecture classes as well as fieldwork.
“Just by reading a rubric, you can’t always tell what’s expected,” Bluher said. “I’ve kind of figured out what they expect, but there’s still a big lack of communication because we don’t meet every day.”
Her crucial field work had to be postponed or rehauled entirely. Taping ankles, using calipers to measure Body Mass Index and taking blood pressure are all vital skills she needs to develop — skills that, unfortunately, require close contact with other human beings. Every patient has become a potential biohazard, with what were once simple day-to-day tasks becoming shrouded behind a wall of red tape, masks and hand sanitizer.
“What I’m doing for grad school is very applied work, very hands-on,” Bluher said. “And so far, when I ask grad schools what they’re looking for, they’re like ‘Oh we want people with experience, with that applied work.’ How am I supposed to do that when the whole world is shut down?”
Glassdoor estimates that over half of United States internships were canceled in the spring, with the vast majority of internships shifting to remote-only. For something hands-on like exercise science, opportunities to develop relevant experience are hard to come by in a socially distanced reality.
For those students whose education hinges on the quality of in-person instruction and human interaction, there is no Zoom equivalent.
Beyond the credits and classes that they’re taking, the experiences that students receive from them are becoming less relevant to what they can apply to a world without COVID-19. For Bluher, it means losing out on in-depth discussions that seem to fizzle out in a Zoom meeting, reverting what were once upper-division classes into what she says feels like first-year busywork. For Noreen, it means maintaining a better grasp on her education at the expense of its quality, as she’s able to master her own schedule while accepting that what she’s learning may be compromised by a lack of face-to-face communication.
The awkward silences that would once force a response out of students have been lost, as students learn to hide behind disabled cameras and microphones. Exasperated instructors lose the will to deliver character to their classes, with many recycling charmless, recorded lectures for quarters at a time. Many students never learn their instructors’ faces, Noreen included. They can become a detached horde of names and email addresses rather than people to forge relationships with.
Beyond the social aspect of classes, the transfer to remote learning has caused significant disruption to many majors’ plans of study. Of those surveyed by OneClass poll, 71% of 1,562 college sophomores said that opportunities in their major had been reduced. With only 25% saying they’ve gone unaffected as a result of the pandemic, the remaining 4% said they had to change majors, drop out, or cannot graduate on time.
The college internship traditionally offers the ability for undergraduate students to develop skills that are harder to develop in a conventional classroom setting. For the most part, companies are providing interns with options to conduct their work virtually. Throughout the summer, 70% of companies that offered internship programs shifted to either fully or partially remote versions of their programs according to Edwin Koc, a director of research and public policy at the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Noreen still acknowledges that she benefits from the remote education and internships, but the feeling of “am I learning this as well as I can?” never quite goes away. With her study-abroad program canceled, she spent months researching Icelandic climate change. In an attempt to emulate the experience that she lost out on, she consumed dozens of papers, news articles, and interviews regarding the topic in order to develop a synthesis essay. With help from her advisor, she managed to write something she could be proud of, at the cost of what would have been a memorable experience.
The nitty-gritty of the lab — what she calls the “fun” part of the major — was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead with spreadsheets and busywork.
Effie Eisses, the Career Services Director at Western, said that in the face of another remote year, companies offering internships are becoming more and more adept at meeting the inherent challenges of remote learning, citing the creativity of the offered content as proof that online internships are moving into the right direction.
“I’m quite encouraged and optimistic seeing the creativity of the organizations, and their willingness to want to make sure they keep hiring those interns and finding ways to make it happen,” said Esses.
Many of the remote internships have at least attempted to create meaningful content for students to engage with; ranging from Zoom happy hours developing bonds between employees to delivering the materials to interns’ residences. Esses said that she believes that companies are doing their best to translate the hands-on, working reality to a digital-analog as well as they can.
Despite this, the experience that students gain from these compromises may not prove to be relevant to their field of choice in the future, with a virtual equivalent often only scratching the surface of the professional world. And in conjunction with underwhelming remote education, students like Bluher feel like they’re at a disadvantage compared to their contemporaries.
Labs, when compared to many other lecture and upper-level courses, are the rare occasion in undergrad where hands-on work meets applicable, real-world experience. Bluhers’s online lab, despite the promise of a comparable equivalent, offered neither. Instead, she was told to instead file lab reports using data derived from previous classes’ labs in lieu of her own.
As a visual learner, Bluher found it difficult to believe that the class would stoop low enough to offer such a compromised version of the experience. The nitty-gritty of the lab — what she calls the “fun” part of the major — was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead with spreadsheets and busywork. As she engaged with the class, what she would normally have cared about was hollowed out and replaced with a paltry substitute; she felt like she was paying for a bachelor’s degree rather than an education.
In the face of what seems to be a fully remote year at Western as COVID-19 cases continue to rise in Washington state, students can most likely expect to continue their academic careers remotely, along with future internship opportunities. Esses, however, painted a positive picture for those looking to dip their toes into a professional setting.
“I would say two-thirds of the organizations on our advisory boards said that they are going to have their internship programs this year,” Esses said. “They’re expecting to hire the same amount or more students compared to what they had hired already. So we were very encouraged, actually.”
Going forward, it’s up to teachers and students to make the most of online classes. Simply taking what was there beforehand and forcing it to work, regardless of how well it translates, robs both parties of the meaningful classroom experiences that they need to make the most of their educational careers.
Online work has its pitfalls; Zoom meetings require both the teacher and the taught to resist the temptation of cutting corners. For companies offering internships, keeping interns engaged with content that has real-world viability in their field and looking beyond the short term would benefit both parties. But with two quarters behind us and at least another remote one in our way, ironing out the kinks sooner rather than later is vital to conserving the quality of higher education for students across the country.