Lena Hansen

The spring 2022 was both exciting and, admittedly, anxiety-inducing. After two weeks online, students and faculty returned fully in-person instruction and events. For many students, including myself, the return to the classroom was strange. The majority of my undergraduate experience to that point had happened online. I was evicted from campus during my freshman spring; suddenly I had to leave my dorm and friends in the U.S. to return home to Germany. There, I spent two semesters online with a six-hour time difference, and another attending Zoom classes from my off-campus apartment in Philly. In spring 2022 I was a junior finally getting back to the college experience I dreamed I would have.

This was the moment I—and many others—had been waiting for! This is what I hoped for while attending lectures at midnight in Germany, as my parents and siblings slept. And yet, returning to the classroom was daunting—not just because of the virus. Suddenly, I would be an entire body again, not just a face and perhaps the upper quarter of a torso in a tiny rectangle on a computer screen miles away. Other people would actually see me, and I would see them. And while the small interactions with my instructors and peers was what I missed first (and perhaps most) during online learning, part of me was scared those interactions would not be the same. What if I had completely unlearned talking to strangers without a breakout room? What if no one would talk to each other because we all became so accustomed to learning alone, that we would never get that comradery back? 

Of course, isolation had not caused me to unlearn (all) the social skills acquired throughout the first 20 years of my life. And yet, I walked into my first class feeling like it was the first day of freshman year all over. I didn’t know anyone, and if I did, the mask and the semesters on Zoom made them hard to recognize. Within minutes, I saw that my fears had been unfounded. The two-minute chats before class that I had missed so much were back! These small interactions—a comment to your neighbor about how difficult the homework was, a quick chat about the torrential Philly rain that caused you to walk into class looking like a drowned rat, or a question to your professor about the reading after class—were and are central to my Penn experience. I met other German students I may never have interacted with otherwise, talked to professors about their research, asked what progress others had made on their essay. While these little interactions might have once seemed insignificant, they were what I missed most about my educational experience and their absence affected my passion for learning and ability to study effectively. 

Being around my classmates encouraged me to learn from and with them. In particular, I was able to pursue my academic interests and passions with renewed vigor. Through those short interactions before class, I found an amazing project group. Working on the project in-person, we were able to stage a court hearing rather than a standard PowerPoint presentation. The project not only solidified my understanding of class concepts, but also made learning fun again. Later, that project group turned into a study group for the final and a movie excursion unrelated to the class. College is both an academic and a social endeavor, and in-person learning allowed me to connect these aspects of the Penn experience. 

Alongside more interactions with my peers, TAs worked to reinvigorate classroom discussion that suffered over Zoom. They tried to create connections between students through structured introductions and icebreakers, allowing students to get to know their peers across majors, years, and backgrounds. Many TAs allowed us to engage organically with the material, by linking the class content with our various opinions and experiences. By learning about us, TAs were able to draw on the experiences of individual students and encourage us to use our knowledge. Further, we collectively reflected on course assessments, allowing us to learn from our own and others’ mistakes and successes. These conversations were much easier face-to-face, with everyone engaged in the classroom. These collective learning experiences enhanced my academic endeavors this semester. 

Professors put new effort into forging connections, learning students’ names, and chatting with us before and after class. Many of them made a conscious effort this semester, more than in previous semesters, to engage with students. They drew on these interactions to ask individual students with unique backgrounds their opinions during class discussions, and highlighted good contributions. This encouraged me to participate in class, as I felt seen beyond that small Zoom rectangle. Rather than a screen of students, it felt as though every individual was important to the class discussion. Once again, these interactions were more successful due to the in-person learning environment. Additionally, professors took advantage of extracurricular programs like “Take Your Professor to Lunch” to engage more personally with students beyond the confines of the classroom. These lunches allowed me to look beyond the syllabus and speak to instructors about their research and thoughts on current events as they relate to the course. This gave me more context for the course content and allowed me to engage more with the academic material, internalizing many of the concepts and helping me understand their application. 

Over the pandemic, I lost the real and thorough engagement with my courses. Sitting in my room in Germany alone at 12 a.m. made me lose contact with my academic passion. I stopped internalizing the material, rather brachiating from one assignment to the next without stopping to fully understand the material I was being taught over Zoom. I was missing the human and qualitative component of learning, reduced only to the quantitative aspect—grades. However, coming back to campus and to the classroom brought me back to that innate beauty of learning and knowledge. That would not have been possible without the tacit support of my peers and my instructors. Despite my initial anxiety­—and the need to get out of bed and change out of pajamas—in-person learning enhanced my academic experiences. 

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Lena Hansen is a member of the School of Arts and Sciences’ Class of 2023. She serves as the Chair External of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education.

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.