Transition to university
All our group members have transitioned directly from upper secondary school to university. In our situation, this has been both beneficial and very challenging. The pandemic made our last semester in upper secondary class remarkably different. The curriculum was delayed and pushed forward time and time again. The exchange between physical and digital lessons were also irregular.
The benefits were that we got used to alternating between physical and digital lessons. The downside was that it was easy to be lazy, and that made the whole transition even more demanding. In the beginning of the semester we started slow, but we quickly pickked up the pace. In order to keep up with the curriculum we had to be consistent with our work.
Managing the workload
For some of us it has been quite draining especially since the workload has significantly increased. In upper secondary school we were used to a mix of online and physical lessons. Now several of our subjects are completely online, thus we are not followed up on our work like were used to. Even though we have contact with our teachers through lessons and obligatory assignments we don’t have the same one on one relation with our teachers. Unlike before, we are now expected to do most of the work by ourselves.
The university has made sure to put in place quite a few obligatory assignments to make sure we work evenly across our semester. It is estimated that we work 8 hours a day with our subject, since it is a full- time study. Most subjects have three to four obligatory assignments throughout a semester. Multiplying this with our four subjects, we quickly have 15 + assignments in one semester. Most of these assignments are quite challenging and time consuming. We were able to cut the workload down since we work in groups, but it was still a challenge to make time to work on the same project even though we have different things to work on. Considering many of us also have a part-time job, it has been strenuous to balance work and school.
Facing new challenges
We realized that we had to be consistent with all our work to be able to prepare ourselves for our exams. It is difficult to have the discipline to set aside time for schoolwork as most of it was self-learning from home. It has been challenging to keep up with all the work since there is a lot of new things. In our programming subject we learned a completely new programming language. In upper secondary school we were taught JavaScript, but now we are using Java.
Contrary to what we assumed the two languages do not share similarities. It is almost as learning two completely different languages. In other subjects such as Web development we were introduced to new methods that were advanced and more structurally correct. There were a lot of bad habits that we carried from what we had learned earlier, which was a challenging temptation. Using elements such as “float” and “br” was acceptable in upper secondary school, but we quickly realized that these were things we absolutely had to refrain from going forward.
