English
Eje Agalar, a sophomore at Weinberg College, goes to bed at 3 a.m. and wakes up around noon. The native of Istanbul spends most of her time studying online, but her course is taught in a US time zone. Consequently, the difference in time between Turkey and the US turned her from a morning person into a night owl.
According to Agalar, this is real torture for any international student forced to adapt to education's new realities during a pandemic.
Like many students living abroad, Eje feels she is in limbo, physically in one country, but simultaneously living on another's schedule.
The system's Student Affairs Coordinator Mark Hare, said that less than half of international undergraduate students took online classes while in their home country last fall. Moreover, some have taken a sabbatical until the next winter semester. In the current circumstances, this solution seems to be the right decision for the majority of international students.
Moreover, many international students have begun to complain of headaches due to long hours of work at the computer, often lasting from morning until ten o'clock at night. Online classes' workload is much higher than in full-time education and leading to students feeling psychologically exhausted.
For the current academic year, freshmen and sophomores from other countries were allowed not to attend face-to-face classes due to the risk of infection associated with long-haul flights and multiple transfers. Financial difficulties of students have become an equally important problem.
Job fairs and student clubs are all important parts of college education, but all have been canceled and closed this year. As a result, many students felt even greater isolation from their educational institutions, which has been detrimental to their career prospects.
Git Vanain, Director of the Department for International Student Affairs, said he monitored the immigration service's updates around the clock. It is currently problematic for him to predict how the situation will unfold in a week or a month. He doesn't want to make false claims, so he can't predict how long the lockdown restrictions will last.
Some US educational institutions, such as Cornell and New York Universities, have created temporary entry opportunities for international students. They actively cooperate with foreign universities and use their campuses to accommodate students from other countries.
