The spring semester has officially begun and I am already over it. I am overwhelmed to the fullest extent. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my illustrious HBCU, North Carolina A&T but being in this pandemic is an entirely different feeling. I’m an out-of-state student and to save money I decided to take my usual 17 credits online this semester. It saved me the hassle of trying to navigate through the confusing hybrid classes and the corona particles in the air. This is my second semester of sophomore year and I want things to be as chill as possible! Well, they aren’t and we’re just a week in.
Since my classes are online, there are no scheduled meeting times. No Zooms, no classes, just assigned work and vibes. It’s a different feeling but I was determined to make the best of it no matter what. I decided that I just had to go at my own pace and make sure to not miss any deadlines. At least I’m working by myself. Right? No.
Group assignments. Why are there group assignments? We are in the middle of a pandemic while taking a fully remote course and our classmates are scattered across the many time zones of America but we have …. group projects? This was very frustrating to me because I had to rely on complete strangers to help me obtain the grade I know I deserve from a class where the teacher will never even speak to us. Crazy.
In disbelief, I turned to Twitter to shameless vent. The tweet was directed to the few Aggies on my timeline, hoping that they were just as upset at the injustice of distance learning. I didn’t know it would go viral. It was just me complaining and I even spelled a word wrong. I sent the tweet, sighed, and locked my phone. I needed to decompress.
I log back on to my Twitter about an hour later and I see the tweet is doing oddly well. The comments, retweets, and quotes tweets were going crazy and I had a bunch of likes. Hours go by and friends are DMing me jokingly asking for an autograph. By the end of the day, my phone would not stop buzzing and every time I pulled down to refresh my notification there would be hundreds of new interactions. I’d gone viral!
Everything wasn’t great going viral. I saw a bunch of ‘matter-of-fact’ tweets and rude comments letting me know how stupid of a complaint it was or how team projects will prepare me for the real world. I looked past this though because I expected it. Sure, I’d had semi-viral moments where I had hundreds and thousands of likes on a tweet here and there but this was a different level. My only hope is to inspire professors to maybe give us a break on the group projects. I mean, we are in a pandemic after all.
