“I’m very proud of how well I responded to pretty much my entire world shifting.”

Amaya Barker is a junior at UWM. She sat down with Brianna Schubert to talk about her highs and lows of the pandemic.  

(Brianna Schubert) What was the hardest thing of the last year for you?

(Amaya Barker) Just not feeling like I was learning something in school. It felt like I was teaching myself off of PowerPoints and textbooks, and I wasn’t getting that instruction or clarification. I don’t feel like I got to connect with my professors or classmates, which is kind of the appeal of college for me, like working in group settings and bouncing ideas off of each other. There were professors that I had virtually no interaction with that did everything so asynchronously that it felt like I was being taught by robots. That really was a detriment to how I learned. I understand the limitations of virtual learning, but I felt like there was more that could have been done for the students.

(Schubert) What did you learn from that?

(Barker) I learned self-reliance and the importance of doing things myself. So, when I had questions, I had to reach out to professors and TA’s. When I was doing assignments, I had to keep myself motivated and on-task. I had to become very resilient and hard-working. And I had to push myself to stay on top of it, and I felt really good about how well I was able to maintain grades, keep up with assignments, and keep myself engaged.

(Schubert) How was life outside of school?

(Barker) I work at a Pick ‘n’ Save, and I was an essential worker because people still needed to buy their groceries throughout the pandemic. There wasn’t really a lot of help or extra support for me. I was working with people every day and exposed to a lot of different people while also trying to make sure I was maintaining safety for my mom and brother who are both high-risk. I felt like my job could have been more understanding that while I was working during the pandemic, I was also experiencing the effects of the pandemic. Like pay increases when my mom couldn’t work, or extra medical help would have been nice. My job giving free testing or vaccines or that kind of stuff would have been really helpful, but they didn’t do that.

(Schubert) Is there anything else that I didn’t ask you that you wanted to add?

(Barker) Everyone should feel proud of themselves for persevering and coming back to campus the way that they have. Hopefully this shows everybody the value of getting through this—like this is the biggest national emergency in our college age group have ever experienced. People should be proud of themselves and how they responded, even if there were times during it that we were like damn, this sucks.

(Schubert) Are you proud of yourself too?

(Barker) Oh yeah. I thought— just based on past experiences—that when they said everything was going online, I expected to pretty much fail out of college. I thought there was no way I could handle college online, but I did and got pretty good grades. So, I’m very proud of how well I responded to pretty much my entire world shifting.