Cranfield, Covid-19 and o(nline)-week

I was not sure what to expect when moving to Cranfield in September 2020 with Covid-19. The University had been providing us constant updates and plans on how the course was going to be run and the measures they had put in place to protect faculty and students.

Moving in to Stringfellow Hall, I was welcomed with a friendly note from my neighbour providing her number to create a WhatsApp group to connect our flat together during quarantine. Fortunately, I did not need to quarantine having been living in London. It was a nice welcoming but gave a sense of how the experience may be a bit different from previous years experiences. There are four of us living in a block of five to restrict capacity for Covid-19 protection reasons.

O-week schedule was shared and it was all online. We had one session to collect our student IDs and our Cranfield face masks, that we all took advantage of to meet each other and get a tour of the campus. The highlight of the week was the Cabaret competition. Previous year students set us the task to make a TikTok style video of Queen ‘We Will Rock You’. The first challenge was that it had to be virtual, the second challenge was half the group had not heard the song and the third challenge was everyone was in different countries. We had a great time pulling the video together and smashed it, well done guys if you’re reading this! I’ve left the photos and video out of the blog as you’ll have to request a viewing of it.

With o(nline)-week wrapped up it was time to get out and explore the CSA, sports fields, meet the lecturers and get introduced to the social distancing lectures.

I guess the most important part to the start of this journey is; why did I pick Cranfield?

• The amazing alumni that you will meet and become a part of was the first factor that drew me to Cranfield. Cranfield does not advertise or market its brand and quality, its alumnus do. Some great friends of mine are Cranfield alumni and always spoke to me about the amazing experiences they had, so I knew it would be the place for me.
• Being outside of London it has a fantastic atmosphere of outdoors, sports, learning and community. Everyone comes together and forms great bonds, you may also be pushed out of your comfort zone and put in new situations to come up with activities and social events being outside of the cities and what they offer.
• The practical elements of the course to really challenge you with real world style examples to enhance our learning experience. This coupled with some of the top organisational leadership, economics and supply chain management courses in world rankings made it easy to pick too.