Berlin – A piece of normality is returning to the life of students in Berlin: The universities are generally allowed to offer face-to-face events again from Monday. The 3G rule applies at the Technical University (TU), the Humboldt University (HU) and the Free University (FU). Students who have not been shown to have been vaccinated, recovered, or both, must be able to present an up-to-date rapid test or PCR test.
The 3G regulation becomes a problem for unvaccinated and non-convalescent students, as the citizen tests are no longer free. In Dresden, where the lecture period started a week earlier, this situation has already led to protests. The “Students stand up” initiative called for a demonstration in the city center in the first week of the semester. According to the Sächsische Zeitung, around 400 people took part. Since the tests are now chargeable, unvaccinated students are excluded from teaching, they complained.
Similar protests have so far not taken place in Berlin. It remains to be seen whether there will be any reactions to the regulations to open universities in 3G mode. However, when asked, HU, FU and TU emphasized that the vaccination rates among the students were high.
Studying from a shared flat should come to an end
For the vast majority of students, returning to face-to-face operations is a great relief. Many Bachelor students who are now entering the fourth semester have only seen the university to submit and collect documents from within. Others who are completing a master’s degree, which usually only lasts four semesters, will have spent the majority of their studies in the home office and in online formats when they are finished.
Again and again protests were made against these conditions in Berlin. The student initiative #NichtNurOnline, for example, used several campaigns to draw attention to the psychological, financial and social situation of students. For several semesters one felt overlooked and ignored by politics. “The students are simply forgotten,” said a member of the initiative in the summer of the Berliner Zeitung. At this point in time, the students had not had any face-to-face events for more than a year, and many had attended the first semesters of their university days entirely in their shared rooms.
Medical student threatens to leave home for another semester
And obviously the universities are still not returning to pre-pandemic mode this winter semester: Many students are amazed at the still very limited number of events in attendance. For example, a master’s student from primary school teaching at HU Berlin told the Berliner Zeitung that only three out of 14 of her events were planned to be present in the coming semester. This is surprising and a shame, especially since the HU has repeatedly promised to hold “as many face-to-face events as possible”.
For others, nothing has changed compared to the previous semester. A medical student at the Charité in his eighth semester, who also wants to remain anonymous, reports: “In the past three semesters I only managed half of the credit points, and my studies stalled.” want to catch up this semester. However, he has since been informed that he will only have four days of attendance in the entire winter semester.
People sit close together in pubs, but seminars do not take place
“Four days on site do not help me much, I don’t get along well with studying from home, so the face-to-face events are important to me,” he says. “But also simply because the content that we learn in the last semesters is very important in our job, I would like to study face-to-face. It is inexplicable to me that people sit close to each other in restaurants and pubs all over the city, but I do not have a single seminar with a hygiene concept in attendance. “
The 29-year-old is now considering taking a full semester off to work in the winter. He hopes that face-to-face events will finally continue in the summer semester of 2022.
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