They started university amid a pandemic. Is the class of 2024 ready for what’s next?

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It was a strange experience for Jonah Grignon when he ran into a classmate at an art show during COVID-19.

Grignon, now a recent graduate from Carleton’s Journalism school, had taken all of his first-year classes on Zoom. It was a year later, while reporting on the art exhibit for his second-year class, that he bumped into the schoolmate and realized they had never actually met in person.

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Grignon did not know if he should introduce himself. They already followed each other on social media and had numerous classes together.

“That (was) an experience I’ve never really had before,” Grignon said. “You’re sort of aware of someone’s presence, but you never really interacted with them.”

In hindsight, Grignon said the awkwardness during social interaction was temporary.

“Just last night,” he added. “I was out for dinner with the same classmate and a group of other people for a mutual friend’s birthday. I guess you can say that there was a happy ending to it eventually.”

Although the pandemic is in the rearview mirror, Grignon said the impact of COVID-19 on the pivotal years of his life felt like an axe hanging over his head.

“Even when things were good, it was like ‘when are we going to get shut down again?” Grignon said. “It was tough to deal with.”

Grignon was not alone in the perpetual fear of yet another wave of COVID-19 during the first few years of his undergraduate program.

The lockdown not only had a mental health toll on now-graduating university students but also had effects on their public speaking skills, stress management abilities and their use of social media as a coping mechanism. The ultimate question now is whether the class of 2024 is ready for what comes next.

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Leya Aubert-Tandon, a graduating student from uOttawa’s biomedical sciences honours program, felt very socially isolated during her second year after moving to Ottawa for her studies.

She only made friends in her program in her third year when she was, as she put it, “actually in person.”

“Even though I was living with two people … mental health-wise, it was really a struggle for me,” Aubert-Tandon said.

Especially this past year, while Aubert-Tandon felt she was doing better in school, she said she struggled more. “I ended up going to see a therapist.”

The effects of mental distress combined with the lockdown also impacted Aubert-Tandon’s studies.

“Presentations are something students in biomed will have to do their whole lives, but for some reason the school did not teach students skills like public speaking,” Aubert-Tandon said.

“So a lot of us are socially awkward.”

That’s because there were shortcuts to help with public speaking during the pandemic. Aubert-Tandon said students often used little sticky notes on their computers to remember talking points, and did not have to put in the effort to memorize their speeches.

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“This year was the first year I did presentations. I hadn’t done them since high school Grade 11,” Aubert-Tandon said, adding the five-year gap of not talking in front of a large group of people was common among her classmates.

After the first two years of university since the start of COVID, professors started to see gaps in skills in their students, said Kim Hellemans, a professor in neuroscience at Carleton University and an expert in COVID-19’s impact on student mental health.

“By the time (students) hit their third and fourth years, because they weren’t forced to memorize what they were learning, the outcomes were very different,” Hellemans said.

Meanwhile, new graduates are questioning how prepared they are for post-graduate programs, or their readiness to enter the working world.

Aiyana Louis, who recently graduated from Carleton’s environmental studies honours program, said half of her degree was a “blur”.

She kept multiple tabs open on her computer during class. She played loud music at home during tests. FaceTime calls with friends were her study groups.

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“I guess as of today with my last exam, I’m finished. And I feel like there was a blur for two and a half years of my degree that I do not remember what I did.”

Louis, who minored in biology, said COVID-19 took away the experience of working physically in labs.

“Biology is very much hands-on in labs, (but) I completed an entire course of lab work on my computer which was obviously very disengaging,” Louis said.

“I really think that took me away from my interest in biology,” Louis added. “The biology I was interested in was hands-on looking at things through a microscope like planting, getting my hands in the dirt, which unfortunately just could not happen.”

Aubert-Tandon had similar opinions. She said COVID-19 did not allow students the best “hands-on experience” needed in work environments after graduating.

“I think it’s gonna impact a lot of us,” Aubert-Tandon said.

Aubert-Tandon plans on doing her masters in neuroscience in the joint program offered by uOttawa and the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and eventually her PhD. She is hopeful for more in-person engagement during her masters.

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But it’s not just hands-on experience that the students of COVID-19 lack.

Charles Collin, co-director of the honours thesis program in the psychology department at uOttawa, said students who have gone through COVID have weaker writing skills.

“During COVID we kind of made everything easy on everyone,” said Collin.

There are more academic accommodation and extension requests for both class deadlines and honours thesis projects, Collin added. And professors are “quite lenient with extensions.”

“For instance,” Collin said. “We almost never get any requests, or maybe just a couple out of the 100 students,” he added. “This year, I think there were at least a dozen. So it’s definitely gone up.”

Collin said uOttawa’s current policy for exam deferrals states that the first deferral a student requests will be granted automatically – a recent change mandated by the university.

“There’s no need for a medical note or any sort of explanation,” Collin added. “You just ask for a deferral, you got one.”

Collin worries that students will not be met with the same sense of accommodation in the workplace.

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“You do need to go through some degree of stress in order to learn to deal with stress, but of course if you impose too much stress on people, that’s not gonna help them with anything,” Collin said.

Hellemans, the neuroscience professor, says this year’s graduating group of students have a very reduced ability to handle day-to-day stress.

“We’re seeing that in the form of students requesting a lot of academic accommodations regularly,” she said.

Hellemans helped develop courses at Carleton with student mental health in mind.

“(However), that doesn’t mean not stressing out a student at all. It means providing students learning opportunities to face challenges that will then promote growth as well as promote the ability to learn and to be successful in classes,” she said.

Hellemans said the solution to promoting mental health in the academic setting is not to remove or reduce stressors.

“My argument is (reducing stressors) actually makes it worse over time, especially when you’re removing mild to moderate controllable stressors.”

“It’s called stress inoculation theory,” she added. “It’s been tested on animals and plants alike.”

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There’s a difference between feeling unsafe and uncomfortable, she explained. “In university, we should feel uncomfortable. We should feel sometimes like we don’t know what we’re doing.”

But Hellemans said professors and faculty alike are so afraid of causing mental health challenges that they’re removing deadlines.

To cope with the stress of university life, students like Aubert-Tandon planned their course loads wisely.

“I took as many courses that didn’t have exams and just did projects,” Aubert-Tandon said. “That’s what I did in my last two years, and it was amazing.”

Hellemans’ research lab also focused on the use of social media during the pandemic, which went up significantly, particularly among young women.

This professor said the increase in social media use over the last four years is a form of avoidance used by students when facing stressful situations.

Like drugs and alcohol, social media temporarily relieves stress, Hellemans said. On the other hand, “if you measure people’s stress levels when they are regularly using drugs, their baseline stress goes up.”

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Hellemans also said problematic social media use contributed to the increased incidence of mental health disorders, including eating disorders “which has gone through the roof” during the pandemic.

Offline, Hellemans noted that this generation of students is also changing their stress relief mechanisms.

“Alcohol use is going down, and (students) are using cannabis more,” she said. While using alcohol can have visible signs of intoxication, cannabis is very subtle. “There are people who can use a small amount (of cannabis) throughout the day.”

Hellemans worries about how this behaviour pattern will translate into the workforce. “It might be tolerable in the classroom but it may not be at work.”

As for Grignon, he said coming back to in-person after so long created an appetite for socializing more.

“There was this level of interest where we just want to see people for real in person,” Grignon said. “Even though we lost a year or two, in some ways, I think it kind of brought us together.”

Grignon said interacting with younger students who were getting the full university experience during his third and fourth year was a wistful experience.

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“It’s bittersweet,” Grignon said. “But you also see that the world is healing because you’re getting to see people have those experiences.”

Now, Grignon has a full-time position at an agricultural trade newspaper. Although he feels secure about this position after graduation, he doesn’t share the same sentiment about the state of the journalism industry in general.

“I sort of feel like I ended up in a very lucky position,” Grignon said.

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