COVID-19: A College student's perspective

The coronavirus disease is a very serious pandemic that has affected people across the globe. Starting out in Wuhan, a city in the Hubei province of China, this disease has spread across approximately 199 countries including India. Our Prime minister Shri Narendra Modi has declared a nation-wide lockdown for 21 days on March 24^th to stop community spread of this virus and to enable isolation of people affected by coronavirus.

Being an engineering undergrad myself, I believe this is a very confusing time for college students. Firstly, many full-time summer internships and job listings from a variety of companies are now cancelled or postponed indefinitely although a few companies have provided work from home facilities to their already selected interns and employees which is much appreciated. This is a major curveball thrown at most junior and senior year college students and more companies should embrace the work form home culture to provide opportunities to deserving students.(Thanks AICTE but cancelling all summer internships does not help us, click here for more)

Secondly all the students who are graduating and planning to take up a Masters or PhD degree in foreign universities are also heavily affected as many countries like US and China have closed their borders for foreign nationals which means obtaining visas is going to be more difficult. Additionally, students who are going to graduate this academic year from foreign countries are finding it difficult to secure jobs before their student visas expire. These issues add to the woes faced by college grads due to coronavirus.

Thirdly with colleges closed and semester exams postponed (If you are an Anna University affiliated college student, postponement is pretty much the norm for a semester), many students are very clueless about how to spend these unexpected holidays where you can’t leave your house to visit places or meet people. Fortunately, all you need is a computer with a working internet connection to get started. (Although watching Netflix and Chilling seems like pretty good answer, let’s check out more productive alternatives.)

We all have heard of the saying “It takes 21 days to make a new habit” which might not be scientifically very accurate but we do have the 21 days now, so we can make a good start by picking up a new skill. This skill can be something that helps you advance in your career or something that genuinely piques your interest. We can learn these skills from any of the popular MOOC’s that have made a wide variety of course content available at our fingertips. Many of the world’s popular MOOC’s such as Coursera and Udacity have started offering scholarships and fee waivers for college students in this time of crisis which means you can effectively take their certification courses for free or at nominal rates. This makes learning from home easy and available for anyone.

Another way to spend your time is by using your skills and resources to help the world combat this deadly disease. If you are a PC gamer and would like to use your fancy gaming GPU’s for research purposes, Folding@home is a project focused on disease research which uses distributed computing to break up computation-heavy processes such as protein folding to help understand the working of different types of proteins. This project uses your system resources to perform these computation jobs which are essential for developing effective vaccines and cures for diseases such as COVID-19.

Apart from this, various organizations have hosted virtual hackathons with the intention of building real-world solutions to help combat the ill effects of COVID-19 across the globe. A variety of hackathons can be found at websites such as devpost.com, kaggle.com and devfolio.co where students can join and build applications for the betterment of the community. You can also try and land a remote internship if possible by applying on popular internship listing sites such as internshala.com.

Last but not the least, this might be a really insane and crazy idea but we can maybe try to use the extra time to prepare better for our upcoming semester exams since most of us (me) forget to prepare for these exams right until the last minute despite the designated “study holidays” and end up panicking on the date of the exam. It might sound like advice but hey, I’m just listing all the options here.

With the various socio-economic effects of the global coronavirus outbreak, we as people must face trying times ahead of us with the first priority being the containment of the virus spread and identification of affected people to prevent community spread.

Above all the points mentioned in this post, the most important practice to follow in these 21 days as a student and as a citizen of this country is self-isolation and self-sanitation to protect yourself and your loved ones from this deadly infection.