A.When Elisabeth answers the phone, her French course has just ended. The lecturer exceeded a quarter of an hour, Elisabeth is now too late. She laughs at it – what’s a quarter of an hour? – but actually she thinks about time all the time and how little she gets from it. Elisabeth is in her third master’s semester studying psychology in Göttingen, a city she only knows in a pandemic state. It’s not that she never met her fellow students. She has already been out for a walk with some of them, and has had coffee with others. In the summer they sat down on a leash together after a face-to-face exam and drank beer. But Elisabeth wouldn’t call any of them a close friend. The master is now halfway through. “I keep asking myself: should I look for contacts – that also takes time – or should I concentrate on my friends in other parts of Germany and just finish my studies here?” She says. “That is quite stressful for me right now.”
The pandemic has not only mixed up curricula and cleared classrooms – it has also destroyed the social fabric at universities. The effects that the contact restrictions and online teaching had on the friendships and acquaintances of the students are only now becoming visible in their extent. “The social structures have suffered massively,” says Wilfried Schumann from the psychological counseling service of the university and the Oldenburg student union. Schumann has been looking after the mental health of students for more than 30 years. He says the past three semesters had nothing to do with regular studies. “The social togetherness was not possible in these years.”
“I’m happy to speak to someone”
Christian Stegbauer tries to find out what that means in concrete terms. “It’s good that you call,” he says when he answers the phone. He’s sitting alone at his desk at home right now. “I’m happy to speak to someone.” Stegbauer is doing research on social networks at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He started his current project a year ago: He and his team asked 23 students how their relationships have changed in the pandemic and how the overview of their own network has changed: Do the students still know who their friends are friends with are who your fellow students regularly do something with? Stegbauer regularly asked and asked the same question in seminars in his field, the social sciences.
“It was really amazing what we found in winter,” says the 60-year-old. “A very strong reduction in relationships to the closest friends, most of the university contacts were lost.” Many groups split up into two and three-way friendships.
At the same time, the students no longer had an overview of the social network around them – who knew whom and who was going through the same learning phase as them. “We humans always need a comparison, a reference. But students who had taken the first exams had no reference at all. They didn’t know which grades were okay or how much one should learn, ”says the psychologist Pablo Kilian from the psychosocial counseling center of the Leipzig Student Union.
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