- Are you drinking during class?
No, lemonade.
- And I just screamed.
What did I just do?
- [Host] This is my online college horror story.
- So this was my business class in fall semester.
And this class is infamous for just being miserable.
So I signed up, I take the class.
And it's four to five hours of reading every night.
And it's on stupid stuff.
One day, we were doing a leadership activity during class.
And the thing is about these leadership activities,
when they put you in breakout rooms
we immediately bond with each other
over how much we
(in deep evil voice) hate this class.
And this day,
I was particularly not in the mood
to deal with anything related to this class.
I was in a breakout room,
but I didn't even have the breakout room open.
I had Amazon open.
And I remember I was shopping for earrings.
I was shopping for hoops actually.
And I was just talking and I was like,
yeah, like yesterdays reading, even more stupid than ever.
Why did that thing take like six hours?
These breakout room members, they're like,
yeah, you know, like this is stupid.
We shouldn't have to be doing that.
And the entire breakout room is talking,
the entire breakout room is agreeing with me.
And I'm happily scrolling through Amazon.
My brain is somewhere else.
And I proceed to say like,
this class is such a (air horn blaring) show.
The professor is such a (air horn blaring).
And suddenly,
no one in the breakout room was agreeing with me.
And I was like, wait, like what happened?
Like did I say, did I go too far?
And I remember the horror, like, oh my gosh
I'm feeling the horror right now.
(laughing)
And I opened up Zoom and I see my professor.
She's muted herself and she's turned her camera off.
And she has silently popped into our breakout room.
And I was like, oh (air horn blaring).
My heart is racing.
I can't believe I'm reliving this.
What did she hear?
How long?
How long has she been?
I didn't know how long she had been there for.
I don't know what she's heard.
I just switched right back
to the topic of the leadership activity,
which I think was like teamwork or something.
Something, I don't know, I never really paid attention.
And then she leaves, she leaves silently.
She doesn't say anything.
So we just finish up our activity, right?
And we pop back into the main room.
And in my head I was like, okay,
so I'm going to fail this class.
It's fine.
(laughs)
That's okay.
And we pop back into the main room.
And now my professor starts playing back recordings
of each breakout room.
She goes one by one.
I think we're like group six.
And she's playing back our discussions
to show us how teamwork happens, right?
Which is so like, we all know how it happens.
Again, why this class is stupid.
When she gets to group six, she clicks play.
And I realize she's recorded everything on the site.
And she plays it.
And she lets like a solid 20 seconds go by.
Just me saying like, these readings are stupid.
like there's no organization.
Waits for it to play,
and then she fast forwards it
and plays our discussion about the topic.
And she's like, oh,
decent discussion you guys got going there.
The biggest mistake I've ever made in my life.
I just closed my computer.
I went into my closet and I just screamed
like, like a shriek.
What did I just do?
I actually worked even harder after that
because I felt like I had to redeem myself in a way.
And I ended up getting a 91
and I did really well in the course.
You want one takeaway?
You're not as screwed as you think you are.
- My room is right behind our living room.
So the TV is actually right next to my wall.
And every single time my dad turns it on,
every single wavelength there is
vibrates through my wall.
Especially once it's like, in the evening.
I don't know about your parents
but my Vietnamese parents loves their karaoke.
They will bring it into their bedroom, if they can.
During one of my quizzes
my dad actually turned on the karaoke and started singing.
And I vividly remember telling the entire family like,
guys I have something important at 5:00 PM.
Please, no noise.
That totally left their mind.
So my dad was just singing his heart out.
One of my friends in my class also messaged me,
dude, is your dad okay?
Like he's really passionately singing right now.
And I was like, yes, yes.
He's just living out his life right now.
Don't worry about it.
And so another incident
that also involves my lovely father,
was also during my public speaking class.
I don't know why it just has to be that hour of the day.
I was pretty much just sitting in class.
Thankfully we weren't doing any discussion or anything
at this time.
It was just my professor lecturing.
And my dad during the quarantine,
he kind of picked up making cocktails and drinks.
And so he kind of mastered making Mojito that day.
And I was sitting in class, you know, on my Zoom,
and he walks in with a glass of Mojito.
And I just like see him in the corner of my eye.
And I was like, hi dad, I'm in class.
And he was like, yeah,
but like I made this really good Mojito.
Like finally I got it down, do you want to try it?
And I was like, oh yeah, sure.
Like in a bit, I'm in class right now.
And he literally walks over, has a glass in his hand
and he literally just like waves it by the camera.
And I was like, okay, father, like, all right.
And then he like puts it right under my mouth
and had the straw right to my mouth.
And I was just like (sips), okay, cool.
My friends, a few of them did notice it.
And they like messaged me privately in the Zoom messenger.
And they were like, dude, are you drinking during class?
And I was like, no, that was, no, lemonade.
Like, what are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
- We all have that one class
where we dread going to.
For this class, I just felt like I needed coffee.
I'm going to take the risk
and make my way to this coffee shop called Tierra Mia.
We order a coffee, we're having a good time.
The moment we were on the freeway,
I realized that I was kind of cutting it short.
There was a lot of traffic, I'm rushing back home.
I'm like speeding, you know,
I'm just trying to get to class.
Because this professor,
he will mark you absent and you will get points taken off.
I arrive home.
I set at my computer.
I make sure wifi's good.
It was like 6:59, I have like a minute left.
He allows me in, he's taking roll already.
He writes my name down, we're good.
And there's 35 students there.
For some reason, he always manages to pick on me.
Like a good thing to do my homework.
I started losing wifi.
Sometimes you have to leave the class
to be able to connect again to your wifi.
The moment I log back in,
that's when things, like, just took a turn for the worst.
My professor right away calls on me.
And he's like, Stephanie, what's the answer to this problem.
I've been gone for 10 minutes
so I don't even know what problem he's talking about.
I unmute myself, and I'm like professor,
I've been gone for 10 minutes.
And he's like, okay, Stephanie, well don't worry.
We'll wait until you finally are able to do the problem.
We're not going anywhere.
We'll be here until like 11:00 if we have to.
And it's like 8:00 at night and class finishes at 9:45.
But that's when a student decided to message me.
He was like, oh Stephanie, this is the problem, by the way.
This is how you do the problem.
I was finally able to give him the answer
and I feel like he was surprised to be honest.
The lesson I learned from this story
was that I need good wifi.
Because at the end of the day, your professors don't care.
(upbeat music)