Pandemic Consequences upon College Freshmen’s Lives in the Context of Online Education

Abstract

Covid-19 pandemic raised many difficulties in all life’s domains across the globe. The need to adapt was omnipresent and accelerated the emergence of novelty or innovative approaches. Online education for the students enrolled into the 2020/2021 university year was a bigger challenge than for any others. This generation has finished high school in a traditional face to face system and instead of having to deal only with the ordinary challenges of transitioning to face to face college, they’ve been forced to add to it the novelty and uncertainty of the online education during pandemic. The aim of the present research was to identify how pandemic influenced aspects of our college freshman’s life and if they differentiated between positive and negative. Data processing was done with the help of IBM SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys. Following our demarche, we can conclude that our respondents faced numerous negative aspects in this period of their lives due to the pandemic, but the worst of them referred to social, psychological and educational aspects. The positive side of this period from the perspective of our respondents was time, which was used to consolidate connections with family, friends and self. The presence of a pronounced negatively triangle between the general state, social interaction and psychological risks and existence of eight positive categories with a low density of answers, in contrast to nine negative ones with a high density, makes us believe that the effects of this pandemic upon our respondents were rather negative than positive.