AD PRO ANALYSIS: As Learning Moves Online, Design Students Across the Nation Grapple With Uncertainty
A masked pedestrian traverses Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 20. Design schools across the nation, including Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, have transitioned to online learning. According to students, it’s been a difficult adjustment. Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Architectural Digest’s Anna Fixsen took a dive into studying what design students are facing amid learning moving online and what their design future looks like in her April 27th analysis. Fixzen’s analysis revealed students who feel left in the lurch:
When Parsons interior design students shuffled out of their midterm exams last month, they were in a rush to get home. Not only had their critiques run late into the evening, but they were scrambling to follow their school’s latest edict surrounding COVID-19—that courses would operate remotely through mid April. As the elevator descended, Savannah Smith, who is due to graduate with her associate’s degree in May, recalls joking to her classmates, “Oh, my God, this is ‘bye’ for everyone!” Little did she know she was right. Just days later, the school announced that classes would be conducted online for the rest of the term and that all in-person events—including commencement—would be canceled or moved online.
Similar scenes have played out at university campuses nationwide as academic life is upended by the coronavirus pandemic. American design schools, usually bustling hives of activity, are now eerily empty. At Harvard Graduate School of Design’s iconic Gund Hall, hastily packed student cubicles sit vacant. At the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the doors along a row of student housing are sealed shut with blue painter’s tape.
The interior design and architecture students who once occupied these spaces are just now acclimating to a new reality defined by Zoom lectures and virtual pinups. In addition to coping with the usual feelings of anxiety that accompany tough course loads, some feel hamstrung by a lack of access to their studios and their peers, and powerless due to the chaos unfolding just outside their windows. Graduating students, in particular, wonder if there will be a job waiting for them on the other side of the crisis.