Tamil Nadu: Students fly back to campuses abroad

CHENNAI: After more than six months of virtual classes from his home in Trichy, 24-year-old R Aravindh flew back to his university in Italy on August 31.
“I do have the option of attending classes online from my home in TN. But studying abroad is not just about academics, it also means a exposure to new people, culture, places, managers, professors, etc,” says Aravindh, who is pursuing his masters’ in management engineering at Politecnico di Milano. “I wasn’t scared of contracting the virus on the journey, and I believe proper use of masks and sanitizers can protect me,” he says, adding that 90% of his friends have returned to campus.
The pandemic continues to rage across the world, and many universities are offering the option of doing the courses online. But many Indian students have returned to their university campuses abroad as they feel virtual classrooms don’t offer the complete experience of studying in a foreign campus.
Ananya Rao, 18, flew back to the US mid-August, where she began chemical engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “My university offers online classes too, but I had seen my elder brother struggle with online college classes from halfway across the world in the summer. Being in a different time zone, taking exams at night etc. was less than ideal,” says Ananya. “I opted to go to the university so I would be in the same time zone and also to make some connections with fellow students, which would have been very difficult from Chennai.”
Her parents were worried, she admits. “My mother is a doctor so she did a lot of research and felt the risk was relatively low for my age group,” says Ananya.
Others returned to campus as they didn’t want to defer a year or take on extra workload the next year. Nina Dharmaraj flew out on September 4 to start the first year of her Bachelors in veterinary medicine, at the University of Edinburgh.
“The college offered online courses for year one students. However, this meant that the weekly lab classes would be deferred to the next year, making it potentially less effective and adding to workload next year,” says her father R Dharmaraj, who lives in Thiruvanmiyur.
Shreya Prasad, 21, who lives in Padur and is doing Bachelor of Honors in accounting and finances, level 8, at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland, says she returned on September 15 as her residency permit had to be renewed and practical classes would resume on campus. “I could defer the year but I didn’t want that,” she says.