My college partnered with yourdost.com to provide counselling to students from verified psychologists: Shikhar, AKGEC

These are first-hand student accounts on how our young population is managing to keep their exam prep or college course work going from the confines of their homes. In case you want to share your lockdown study experience, write to us at publish@shiksha.com.

It all started on March 14, I was returning to my college that day. But due to the panic situation, I decided not to go back and stay at home until the situation gets normal. On March 21, just after “Janta Curfew” was imposed, suddenly everything changed and a complete lockdown for 21 days was announced by the PM of India. In response to lockdown, my college administration planned to conduct classes remotely. Soon they came up with an online class module known as Google Classrooms, this is a platform for teachers and students to conduct and attend lectures popularly. Faculties were scheduled to take live classes via Google classroom app and the students are notified via email and WhatsApp.

It all sounds good but here is the real problem, I was not able to attend classes due to slow internet speed, the college tried this way of teaching for a week but it did not work.

Next day, they came up with another idea. This time they just send class notes in pdf format for self-study.

I received the class notes and tried to study on my own, which is not easy. Somehow, I studied my class notes. After notes, the college started giving assignments. I completed my assignment in the given time and submitted a soft copy to Google Classrooms. Finally, this worked for most of us despite the availability of pen and paper at every student’s home. What I did, find some old notebooks and A4 papers to complete the assignments.

After completing 3 assignments for each subject, I received the sessional test - assignment and it is contributing 100 points, this is the same as sessional tests which college takes every year. There is a time frame to complete the assignment, I received the assignment at 10 am which I was required to submit before 7 pm. In this way, I gave my sessional exam.

A few months ago, my college partnered with yourdost.com, Your Dost is an online platform, which takes care of the issues related to mental health and counselling. They have a great panel of verified Psychology experts. And in this lockdown time, they helped me a lot to cope up with the situation and become mentally stable. Adopting a sudden change in academics is not as easy as it seems. However, this is good that we are learning from the situation as my college is adopting digital platforms to teach. Moreover, we are learning to use digital technology in a better way.

About the Author:

Shikhar Singh is in the fourth year of mechanical engineering from AKGEC, Ghaziabad. He likes to guide students about engineering entrances and careers. His fields of interest are natural science, Sanskrit, flute music, sketching and writing. By profession, he is a digital marketer and a content creator.