The year 2020 has become a year of surprises and force majeure for all of all, and from a year of high hopes it turned into a year of patient waiting. Everyone has their own story that can and should be shared. I want to tell my story about how I managed to return home from China during the period when the Covid-19 pandemic was still considered the Wuhan epidemic, and how I completed the first year of my master's degree remotely.
I realized my dream and entered the master's program in Shanghai in China, at Shanghai University for an MBA program in the fall of 2018. When the euphoria stopped spinning my head, a difficult and long period of adaptation began, when I really felt that I was learning to live anew: everything in Chinese, incredibly huge amounts of information (also in Chinese) that my brain simply didn`t have time to process, related to school and everyday life. When the first semester came to an end, it seemed that life had found its course: Chinese became a "second native", I made friends with my classmates, and plans for the future began to appear… And when the whole of China was actively preparing for the Chinese New Year and all the Chinese returned to the regions like a snowball (which, by the way, never comes to Shanghai), news about the new virus started to appear one after another. Literally within a week, the so-empty streets of Shanghai turned into scenes of apocalyptic TV series. We celebrated the Chinese New Year already being locked in the dorm, without the opportunity to go outside the campus. At that time, no one knew what kind of virus it was, how dangerous it was, what measures should be taken, and what to do with all this. One thing was clear: it was safe and quiet at home. Therefore, almost all the students who stayed in Shanghai during the winter holidays started buying air tickets to return home. And I also quickly packed up my things, booked my tickets, and carefully, while the borders were open (there were less than 100 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Shanghai), flew to Moscow.
I was sure back then that in a month, at the beginning of March, the university would start a new semester, and everything would return to its place, but the Wuhan epidemic turned into a global pandemic, and it became clear that it would not be possible to return to China in the near future, and the new semester would continue online.
In March, the spring semester was launched, we all became "zoomers" at once, and learned how to organize ourselves and our work at home. At first, it was difficult to adapt to the remote learning format. The main difficulty for me is the time difference between Shanghai and Moscow in 5 hours. That is, when classes started at 8 a.m. in Chinese time, it was 3 a.m. in Moscow, so instead of morning pairs, I had night pairs, and then morning pairs. I had to force myself to go to bed at 8-9 pm to start a new day at 3 am.
The Chinese took distance education quite seriously: teachers used a special platform to publish pre-recorded video lectures for each lesson, a list of recommended literature and additional materials on the topic; on the day of the lesson, an online broadcast was held, during which teachers additionally explained the material of the class, interviewed students for understanding, and after the lesson they published homework in the form of a test, an analysis of an article or a case study. And so on each subject, of which there were 5. The workload during distance learning has increased markedly, and the amount of information has increased, too. Chats for each subject were created in the Chinese messenger Wechat, where, among other things, you could maintain constant contact with the teacher, ask a question or clarify something. It turned out that you can get used to this format and the daily schedule, and find a lot of useful things.
At MSSES, we wrote a lot, all the reporting was in the form of an essay. All Chinese take exams, so when we switched to distance learning, the exam format had to be changed to an essay. It was very difficult for all my classmates, and I was even more comfortable, because I had rather large experience in writing, so I passed all the works for excellent grades.
Now the first year of my Chinese multi-format master's degree is over, the session is closed, all the work has been completed. This year has shown me that change is the only constant in life, and any force majeure is an opportunity to learn something new. Now I am rebuilding for the third time and looking for the opportunity and strength to move on and evolve.