The topic of the corona-virus crisis is current and data on the ways in which individual students experience this crisis and the impact on their studies or profession are not yet known. The conducted qualitative survey is therefore devoted to experiencing this crisis from the perspective of students and the importance of the foundations of their attitudes in coping with this challenging situation. Students of the bachelor’s programme Leisure Education were given an assignment – an authorial essay on the topic ‘I, my profession, and covid’. This was then phenomenologically analysed in order to determine the subjective level of experiencing the crisis. From a sample of 182 essays, seven more general attitude codes were read. They illustrate students’ experiences and the way of coping with this phenomenon (using one’s personal attitude) and show the advantage of certain attitude codes (personal settings) for coping with a long-term crisis. The implications of the results are possible at two levels: they offer a methodological opportunity in comparative studies with the expected concurrent (methodologically differently constructed) studies of the corona-virus crisis and also point to the need for an active personal setting in a long-term crisis.