Dear Reader,

As I wiggle my arm into my white fleece jacket, I complain to my roommate about how and why it’s suddenly winter after what seemed like 10 seconds of fall weather. And how there are less than two months left of 2021. Well, the good side of that is I have something exciting to count down to besides the days left until my next assignment deadline, but it also means I have to start tolerating my underclassmen friends roasting me for becoming one more year older soon.

As I start planning for what I’ll do during the winter break, I can’t help but wonder if our lives, ravaged by COVID since early winter of 2020, will at last return to normal. The South Korean government has begun to implement the “Living with COVID” scheme this month, and we are slowly but clearly seeing our lives getting closer towards a normal life. The recent Student Cultural Festival with offline student busking performances, at which I did not mind at all spending three and a half hours to watch in the cold rainy weather, made me feel that normalization actually might be right around the corner.

But at the same time, to be honest, I’ve practically forgotten how to live a “normal” university life. I became too accustomed to waking up at 12:55 p.m. to attend my 1 p.m. online class (please don’t tell me I’m the only one who does this), eating breakfast (or lunch, to be more accurate) while listening to a lecture where I am not required to have my camera on, or joining a Zoom meeting in a hotel while on a trip. As much as I want offline events and gatherings to resume as they used to be, I’d hate to let go of the convenience of online classes. And that leads to the question every one of us probably faces these days: when I say I want my “normal” life back, do I mean I want the exact same life I used to have approximately two years ago?

At least for me, the answer would, and should, be a “no”. COVID has exposed major problems of our education system, and how a more fundamental discussion needs to revolve around what type of education will allow students to enjoy learning and pursue knowledge by themselves. For example, COVID has shown us that bland, traditional one-way lectures are uninteresting online as well as offline — students benefit more from the flexibility of being able to rewatch it or pause it any time. Although quite involuntarily, we’ve seen what does and does not work for online lectures these past four semesters, and COVID gave us a unique opportunity to take a peek into what digital education would look like and what we need to work on to construct a better one.

We, as students who are most directly affected in this era, must actively engage in discussing what type of future awaits for universities, particularly for KAIST. In this month’s Feature, we collected student opinions on the return to “normal” and analyzed what to expect from the “Living with COVID” scheme of the government. In International, we explore what vaccine passports mean for our society’s first major step towards normalization, and in News, we report on the immediate changes that will be observed on KAIST campus. Yes, it seems like half of this month’s paper (including this Letter) talks about COVID, but that only highlights how important it would be for us to reflect back on the two years of COVID and the lessons we should take away from this time. It seems like, with the cold, a return to normal is knocking on the door, and it is time for us to think more critically about what kind of “normal” we want and need.

Looking forward to normalcy,

Jisun Lee

Editor-in-Chief