While everyone’s lives were touched by Covid, students had a unique experience. They were often isolated, living with people they didn’t know well. The way their degrees were taught was radically altered - practically overnight. And while their age group was not the most at risk, they often found themselves protecting and caring for others, at a time when they wouldn’t usually have such responsibilities.
Welcome to Covid-19: The Student Experience. In these podcasts we’ll be looking at how students were affected by the coronavirus pandemic. This links to the City University of London Conference on Student Mental Health and the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Episode 1
Caring Responsibilities
In this episode, we’ll be looking at students who found themselves in the role of carers or dealing with family members with health problems during Covid. We don’t know much about students who look after family members generally, but research from the University of Staffordshire suggests that they face huge difficulties. That can be around meeting deadlines and attending lectures, or enjoying the wider more social aspects of university.
Conference
Welcome to our Student Mental Health and the COVID 19 Pandemic: Knowledge exchange and transfer conference.
"We were really interested in the impact of COVID 19 on our students, but while we were doing the research, we realised very quickly that we actually found it quite hard to get in touch with stakeholders across the university with students and student services. And we wanted to find a platform to really engage with other people. And we also found that we needed more contact with researchers from other universities to actually look at whether we are measuring the right stuff, whether we use consistent measures and to learn from others what they're doing and what type of interventions and Prevention's are offered for students"
This conference was organised by Dr Anne-Kathrin Fett, Dr Corinna Haenschel, and Dr Sebastian Gaigg from the Department of Psychology and Dr Glenda Cooper from the Journalism Department at City, University of London in collaboration with the SMaRteN network.
