Online exams, thesis supervision meetings on Skype and data analysis in my pajama. That is what my life as a master student currently looks like. This is not quite what I expected when I started my master in one of the coolest, newly renovated buildings of Leeuwarden. Corona has impacted all our lives in many different ways, graduating being one of them.

Frankly, I must admit, I am enjoying graduating from home. Living in a small town one and a half hours away from Leeuwarden, studying at home saves me heaps of travel time. So besides studying, I have become my own private gardener, cook and started learning handstands. Another advantage is that I now have my own home gym, so I can just wake up and do a little workout.

 In terms of studying, I have found it hard to motivate myself sometimes. Therefore, I started planning my days and included a little morning routine. Currently, I am finishing off my thesis. I am lucky that my project is not heavily impacted and I can still continue this. The only change is that supervision meetings and meetings with the organisation are online. Which for me personally works fine. It is of course less personal and feels more detached. However, I also think it is an important lesson for the future to reconsider our traffic behaviour and whether all current movements are essential in a world with limited resources.

Nonetheless, there are certain things I do miss. One of the biggest being my classmates, breaks have become boring. Walking and listening to a podcast does not match up with having a bowl of soup and a chat at the university canteen. Although our class is in touch, social interaction is definitely one of the main things I miss. On top of that, it gives me an odd feeling that we will be graduating soon already, but we probably won’t meet in real-life for a graduation ceremony. It is like drinking beer without alcohol or a cake without a cherry on top.

Overall, graduating this way is definitely not the most companionable and fun way. However, I think it opens up a lot of new insights into life. May it be in how we view our daily study processes or whether we learn a new skill, it made graduating for me certainly a new learning-process in itself.