I thought studying online would be easier than moving across the globe

Watching the world from my desk

I remember sitting in my room, staring at the screen, trying to figure out if I was actually learning anything or if I was just getting really good at navigating different time zones. The idea of attending an American university without actually packing a suitcase felt like such a brilliant shortcut at the time. I was looking into various programs, specifically ones like Minerva University, where the whole draw is the nomadic lifestyle, but then reality hit. I realized that my own living situation was, well, entirely stationary. I started looking at these online-heavy models thinking they would be a clean alternative to the whole ordeal of international student visas and expensive housing markets in places like Silicon Valley or New York.

The reality of virtual participation

It is strange how quickly a 100% online discussion-based class becomes exhausting. You sit there, and you are supposed to engage with people who are physically somewhere else, and there is no whiteboard, just a grid of faces. I remember one specific Tuesday—or maybe it was Wednesday, I honestly lost track—where the Wi-Fi kept stuttering. I had paid about $30 for a monthly high-speed upgrade just for these sessions, but the lag remained. It felt like I was constantly arriving two seconds late to every joke or intellectual point. You try to speak, and you end up interrupting someone because the latency is just slightly off. It makes you feel like an observer rather than a participant, even when you are literally staring into a camera lens.

Missing the point of the classroom experience

Sometimes I wonder if I should have just committed to a physical campus like UNLV or maybe something in Arizona. At least there, the friction is tangible. You walk to a building, you sit in a chair, and you leave. Here, my bedroom is my office, my classroom, and my dinner table. The lack of physical boundaries starts to mess with your head after a few months. I spent so much time comparing these options, checking rankings, and looking at how many hours a day I’d actually be ‘in class,’ but I ignored the fact that my focus would drift the second I heard a noise in the kitchen. It’s not that the education wasn’t ‘good’—the content was fine—it was that the delivery method made everything feel like a series of fragmented tasks.

The cost of flexibility

People talk about the cost-effectiveness of these online programs, but they rarely mention the hidden price of discipline. When I was looking at tuition costs, which could range anywhere from a few thousand to much higher depending on the accreditation, I kept telling myself I was saving money by not paying for a dorm in the US. That is technically true. But then there is the cost of energy—the sheer amount of mental effort required to self-motivate in an environment designed for sleeping and relaxing. I found myself looking up local co-working spaces near my house just to get out of the house, which added another $150 a month to my ‘study budget.’ It made the whole initial calculation feel a bit useless.

Looking back at the initial confusion

I still don’t know if this was the right call. Sometimes I feel like I missed out on the ‘real’ experience of sitting in a lecture hall with a professor who is actually in the room. Other times, I look at the news about campus life and feel relieved I’m not dealing with the commute or the cost of living in another country. It’s a weird, unresolved feeling. I finished the core modules, but I don’t necessarily feel like I ‘went’ to university in the way I imagined when I was eighteen. It was just a long, intense period of staring at a laptop, waiting for the screen to load, and wondering if anyone on the other side could actually tell that I was wearing sweatpants under the desk.