WEEK 7 – THE BERLIN DESIGN TRIP THAT WASN’T MEANT TO BE, COVID-19 & WORKING FROM HOME
- Joe Breen
- Apr 19, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: May 5, 2020
This week, we were supposed to be going on a design trip to Berlin. Everything was all sorted; accommodation, bus travel, and flights. And in the end, all of it was called off because of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.
We were all told that we could still go on the trip, but we would have no reassurances if anything happened while we were over there. I thought about going, but in the end, I decided against it. This was because since the lecturers weren’t going, I didn’t think it would be as good, and it would’ve ended up being a short holiday (which wouldn’t have been a bad thing). Also, as part of the design trip, we would’ve had a few different design exercises to do, and I felt that we wouldn’t be able to do them as well, as we might’ve done before the coronavirus outbreak was announced.
In the end, around 15 PDT students went on the trip, whereas the 25 other students, including myself decided against it. The next question was ‘what are we going to do now?’ Well, because some students in our course went ahead on the trip, the lecturers couldn’t carry on with weekly lectures if they would just be going through it all over again the following week. However, our SolidWorks lectures were still going ahead, and we were able to attend them if we wanted to. Apart from that, for the rest of the week we just had to carry on with our current college assignments.
On Thursday, we got an email from the college about Leo Varadkar’s decision to close all schools and colleges for the indefinite future as the coronavirus outbreak had been upgraded to a pandemic. Next thing I knew, I was packing up and heading home, as there was no point in staying down in UL since the entire college was going to be closed from 6pm that day.
Now because of COVID-19, the entire course schedule has been moved online. Lectures will still be going ahead online on BigBlueButton and other web conferencing software, through the meeting links under each module on Sulis. Also, on the bright side, assignments submissions will be easier as we now only must email them or submit them online, whereas if we were still down in UL, we’d have to submit physical copies for some of them. The downside of everything being done online now is that some people might not have as good an internet connection as others. Another downside is that some people might not have access to certain software (e.g. SolidWorks, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc) as they were all already installed on the UL computers. The last downside to this is that a majority of UL student are paying to stay in UL accommodations, and now because of COVID-19, we can’t get a refund and our money is being wasted.
Overall, things have now changed, but we’ll learn to adapt to these new measures that UL have put in place. On the bright side, it won’t be forever.
Picture Reference:
123RF (n.d.) 'Working From Home' [website] (Accessed 4th April 2020);
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