80 per cent faced “significant” challenges post-Covid.
International student Xin Ren can relate to how challenging Covid-19 has been for those studying at university.
Her own pandemic trials – she had to delay her PhD by a year – provided a silver lining: Ren’s own experience prompted her to change the direction of her research to look at the negative impact of the pandemic on tertiary students’ learning experiences and psychological well-being.
She thinks giving Kiwi students a voice when it comes to what they’ve been through will not only help their recovery from nearly three years of interrupted studies, but assist staff and institutions to look at ways of helping them through tough times in the future.
“I hope I’ve been able to fill the knowledge gap about the nature of the challenges students are facing,” says Ren, originally from China. “There has been a lot of research into how the pandemic has affected mental health and wellbeing but very little focusing on university students.”
Ren, 29, is delighted at the thought that her research may benefit other students in her home-away-from-home: “I also hope my PhD will be useful when it comes to setting up expectations for the future. Hopefully we won’t get another pandemic like this but transitioning from campus-based learning to online learning is still very challenging – and my research can help faculties and institutions understand those challenges students face and what coping strategies are effective.”
After collecting data from nearly 200 students, she found eight major stressors they had experienced during the pandemic: “One thing that really astonished me was more than 80 per cent said they had faced significant challenges since Covid. That is really high. They felt very stressed and, at some point, had felt it was hard to continue their studies.”
One of the key stressors was struggling with time management while in lockdown. “More than half of the students said they found it very difficult to manage their workload and finish assignments or tasks on time.”
Around a third said they experienced a lack of motivation and had trouble focusing, while about the same amount said they struggled to adjust to online learning.
“Because we had lots of rounds of lockdowns and institution shutdowns, a lot of students found it really challenging to shift between online learning and campus-based learning and back again.”
Social isolation was also a problem, with students missing the interaction with their peers and teaching staff. That’s a concern, because not feeling connected to others can hinder how you cope with other stresses, says Ren.
“I looked at something called a sense of belongingness, which is how connected and valued students feel in their learning community. If students had a strong sense of belongingness, they were more likely to proactively find a solution to their problems or seek support from friends or faculties or family members. Students who don’t have that belongingness were more likely to have ineffective coping strategies, like trying to escape from reality.”
Ren also found that first-generation students –the first in their families to go to university – were less likely to seek support than students with family members who’d been through tertiary education: “Those first-generation students don’t have someone who can provide practical suggestions for coping. I think faculties and institutions should supply additional support for these students.”
Ren, 29, is originally from Hefei in the province of Anhui, near Shanghai and has had a long-held interest in education and languages. After doing her Bachelor’s degree, she came to New Zealand for a year in 2016 to teach Mandarin in Dunedin. She returned to China to do her Master’s but was back in 2019 to start a PhD in educational psychology at the University of Canterbury, looking at the main stressors affecting university students.
After that first year, she and her partner Hongyu, also a PhD student, popped back to Hefei to spend Chinese New Year with family, at which point Covid-19 intervened, preventing her return to New Zealand. She returned to New Zealand in January 2021, in the first intake of international postgraduate students granted border exemptions.
“Once I came back I decided to shift my whole research focus from students’ general learning experiences to the impact of Covid-19 and the lockdowns on their learning. I knew how daunting it had been for me personally and I wanted to know more about how other students had been affected.”
Her work has been presented at several New Zealand conferences and the feedback has been good, with academics and teachers telling her it’s useful to understand lockdowns from students’ perspectives. Her study will also be presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference – the world’s largest gathering of educational researchers.
“For my study about New Zealand to be accepted from more than 11,000 submissions and get attention in the United States is really cool,” says Ren. “Whatever I do next, I just want to make a difference, and it is nice to think that hopefully my study will be contributing something good to New Zealand.”
Xin Ren is one of many international students in New Zealand whose field of study can help people here as well as overseas. These include Ankeeta Karmakar from Assam in India, who has done a Masters of Earthquake Engineering at the University of Auckland and is starting a PhD in the subject.
“I want to undertake detailed research work and do as much study as I can into earthquake engineering,” Karmakar says. “I want to help make society more resilient towards earthquakes in the future.”
Devi Asih from Indonesia is at the University of Otago doing her PhD in Biochemistry and Botany, specifically looking into the quality of water in New Zealand’s lakes and how to improve it. She’s researching bacteria that are an environmentally friendly way of cleaning wastewater systems and can be converted into biomass as a source of renewable energy. Her study has seen her awarded the Marjorie McCallum award from the University of Otago, involving a month of research in Japan and presenting her research at the Society of Biotechnology congress.
Birthe Anemone Bakker from the Netherlands is a PhD student at the New Zealand Tourism Research Institute of Auckland University of Technology. She’s researching the impacts of tourism, sustainability and tourism planning and policy.
For more information: on New Zealand’s international education industry visit newlook.enz.govt.nz/