NEWS
HOMERTON’S PANDEMIC YEAR
The news pages of this magazine are usually filled with guest lectures, concerts, choir tours and sporting achievements. This year, in their place have been endless hours of Zoom calls. Reminders still flash up on online calendars alerting us that today should have been Graduation, the Kate Pretty Lecture, the Boat Race, while we continue to interact via a screen from whichever corner of the house we have managed to commandeer. But while we may not have had the usual array of events, and the College has been empty of staff and students, it has not been short of news.
H
omerton, along with the wider world, was thrown in March into a completely different version of 2020 than the year we had anticipated. It happened, like Hemingway’s bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. We went from drawnout discussions over whether the MA Graduation, scheduled for 28 March, would be able to go ahead, to confronting the unthinkable prospect of sending home hundreds of students in the middle of term. The IT team worked frantically to provide access to remote working for whole departments which suddenly had to reconfigure their activities in order to work from home. The relative merits of Teams, Zoom and Google Hangouts were tried
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HOMERTONIAN
out, and everyone’s devices began pinging with notifications on multiple platforms. We rapidly became experts on the interior design and bookshelf contents of our colleagues’ homes. The Senior Tutor, Dr Penny Barton, and her team had to develop methods of providing a Cambridge-quality education to students scattered to their parents’ homes, connecting students to tutors for remote supervisions, and providing remote access to lectures and the library. “Students and supervisors alike quickly adapted to working from their kitchens and bedrooms in that Zoom dance we are all now all too familiar with,” says Dr Barton. “The superimposed background
quickly took over from the more homely. I really take my hat off to our fantastic supervisors who juggled time zones and disparate groups with different internet connections whilst still looking after babies and home-schooling their children – providing an academic lifeline and sense of normaility for our students to look forward to.” While the College was closed with immediate effect to the majority of staff and students from late March, roughly 60 students who were unable to go home hunkered down to spend their lockdown in Homerton. Grouped into “households” Professor to ensure that no oneMary wasDixon-Woods too isolated and enable them to support each other,
