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CMU Graduates Reflect on Last Year of College During Pandemic, If They Feel Prepared for the Future

Students at Central Michigan University have had to adapt during the pandemic in order to get the experience they need to graduate.

“As a whole, we have learned how to persevere, honestly,” says soon to be CMU graduate Nina Reynolds.

Reynolds is a broadcast and cinematic arts major. She says before the pandemic, her classes involved a lot of hands-on experience.

“When you come into class, clearly you can have multiple people on set, either running the camera doing the mics,” says Reynolds.

When the pandemic hit, all of that changed.

Reynolds says, “It started to become really stressful, especially from my standpoint because I remember I was taking like an advanced audio class, which was the class where we’re learning how to mic up instruments, and clearly that’s not really something you can do from a home setting.”

Reynolds says internship opportunities were also hard to come by:

“I did have an internship lined up that actually got stopped in the middle of my interview process because covid hit.”

Brandon McDonald is a childhood development major. He says before the pandemic he would go into a classroom to conduct research. Now, he’s been learning child behavior through a computer screen.

“There’s tons of videos online of scientists doing things with children that kind of display what we’re trying to learn from them anyway. So we had to pull a lot more of those into class than normal. To kind of accommodate for not being able to go in person,” says McDonald.

However, both McDonald and Reynolds say they’re prepared for the workforce. The pandemic allowed them to obtain skills like flexibility, patience and networking with people across the globe.

McDonald says, “We found new and creative ways that previously nobody thought about that didn’t exist. And we’re prepared and ready to implement them in almost every field we’re going into.”

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