Quarantine diaries: A future engineer's graduation, deferred

CBC Montreal wants to know how you are living these days. What are you doing differently? Have you learned, realized or observed anything?

Here is the next instalment of our series, Quarantine diaries: Life in the time of COVID-19, written by Kishanlal Patel, who just finished his bachelor's degreeat Concordia University.

I'm an engineering student at Concordia. We finished the semester online and had take-home finals or exams for certain courses.

For example, I had a take-home exam for the practical material of the class, with all the math (five big questions, about 14 pages of work), and the theory exam was online. It was multiple choice with some short answers.

My home environment was not the best place for studying. I told my parents to leave me alone in my room for the three hours during my exams, and they respected that.

Adapting to learning from school from home was a bit hard, and very stressful, but it went well. The teachers made it work.

I was planning to attend convocation and invite my sister, who lives in Toronto. It was very exciting for me. From what I've been told, the convocation has officially been postponed, but the graduation date has not changed.

The event that I was personally more excited about was the iron-ring ceremony, which has beenmoved to the fall semester. [Editor's note: The iron ring, worn by Canadian-trained engineers,has been presented to graduates since 1922.]

I will attend in the fall, if all goes well. Hopefully by then, a cure for COVID-19will have been found.

Kishanlal Patel