When Indian student Ashutosh Meelu waved goodbye to his family in 2019 to travel to Luxembourg for his master's, he didn’t realise it would be the last time he’d see them for a long while. “I ended up staying in Luxembourg for the summer because I wasn’t sure if I went to India, I might not be able to come back,” he recalls. But he could be stranded in worse places.

During the initial lockdown when everything at the university came to a halt, the second-year master's student was stuck in his dorm with 16 other students, having lost the income from his part-time job teaching coding. The University of Luxembourg pitched in, and Meelu received €160 in food vouchers over a month as part of a hardship scheme, for students in need who lived in the country. Students could also request a rent deferral, spreading rent payments over a longer period and some, including Meelu, were offered a student contract, which meant he was paid to conduct the research for his course. “I’ve friends studying in Germany, France and Milan and they don’t receive that kind of contract,” he said, adding: “This really helped. Your mental health is really related to your financial health.”

“Nothing is happening”

Within weeks the university moved courses online, lending laptops to students who didn’t have them and, according to Meelu, some international students completed the year by teleworking in their home country. They even offered online meditation and yoga sessions to support students. Meelu stayed as did many of his dormmates, who between themselves agreed not to mix with people from other dormitories, to avoid potential contamination. “Until the middle of May, no-one brought friends home,” he said.

Photo: Christelle May. Christelle May, pictured, is vice president of the Luxembourg students' union ACEL

Since the start of the new academic year in September, the university has offered hybrid lectures and workshops. It’s not ideal for people like Meelu who need to conduct physical experiments. But he says group sizes are small enough for it to be manageable while wearing masks and respecting the recommended distancing.

The atmosphere on campus has changed. “When I came last year, the first semester was all about parties. Right now nothing is happening,” he lamented. This year the only invitations he gets are for free covid tests. “They want to test at least five people in every dorm every two weeks,” he said. The university has communicated the latest infection rates to students since May with the latest suggesting 11 infections, of which nine were confirmed. “The cases never went above 15,” he said.

Student jobs and internships

Not all students were as fortunate as Meelu. Vice president of the Luxembourg student association ACEL Christelle May told Delano the issue of students losing income from a part-time job had been “enormous”. “I hope with the reopening of cafés and restaurants that people will find work,” she said. In some instances, students had been able to negotiate a rent holiday for the time they were not at university, though it remained rare.

Alongside paid employment, internships are important for students to gain real world experience but with office closures and ongoing teleworking, they are few and far between. May, who is studying for a master's in Strasbourg, was left scrabbling for a new placement when her internship scheduled for May was cancelled. After a month of searching, she landed a new placement with a company in Germany, which she ended up doing remotely. “I know other students who had the same problem,” she said.

At least May expects to finish her studies on time. In Germany, which receives the largest number of students from Luxembourg each year (4,650 for the year 2019-2020), students who lost several months of study time during the last semester and have had the duration of their studies extended.

“We’ve spoken to Cedies [the Luxembourg student finance body] and they’ve agreed a supplementary semester grant for people who missed a few months so they can have additional aid,” May said. A ministry spokesperson told Delano on 8 October that thus far 115 students had requested aid for an additional semester because of the pandemic.

Photo: Alessio Buscemi. Alessio Buscemi says this year there are just 70% of the normal number of Erasmus exchange students at the University of Luxembourg

Student exchanges

Skilled in so many languages, it is common for Luxembourg students to study abroad. May believes that the pandemic has not changed that, though figures for the new academic year were not available at the time of publishing.

But the pandemic has impacted the number of international students coming to Luxembourg from abroad with the Erasmus European student exchange programme. Alessio Buscemi, president of the Luxembourg Erasmus Student Network, said that the university received 70-80% of the number of students they’d normally have for the new academic year. “It’s definitely higher than many other universities. For instance, in Italy and Spain, they lost 50%,” Buscemi said, adding: “We saw a change in the countries coming: there are no more third-country nationals, they are all from Europe, a lot from Germany and Trier, which we didn’t have before. Probably they wanted an exchange experience but felt afraid and wanted to remain as near as possible.”

According to a university spokesperson, many universities outside the EU had to limit or halt mobility programmes altogether for logistical and practical reasons. But opportunities are still there at EU universities, which is good news for students because an Erasmus semester abroad is a compulsory part of an undergraduate bachelor degree experience. The university said that students whose Erasmus dreams were scuppered because of covid are now encouraged to postpone or find another university with exceptions being made for those who cannot leave for “justifiable reasons”.

For those Erasmus students who made it to Luxembourg, there may be no parties, but Buscemi and his association ensure the experience remains sociable by organising hikes and tours, with masks, of course. “People don’t seem to be scared about that. They are willing to come to events. Because in the end, it was the same in their home country,” he said.