It’s 1 a.m when Jimmy Onela, a UWM junior Business and Marketing major, receives an email from his study abroad program. He’s over 6,000 miles away from his friends and family and has been studying in South Korea since August.
“TEAN (The Education Abroad Network) has made the tough decision to cancel the TEAN Spring 2020 programs in South Korea,” the email said. “It is important that you immediately begin to make plans to return home.”
His program gave him less than a week to leave the country.
“I had no intention of studying abroad,” Onela said. “It wasn’t until everyone else was studying abroad that I just thought ‘I’ll do it and see how it goes.’”
His friends started making plans to leave the country early last year. In just a few short months, everyone would spread out all over the world.
After meeting international students from Korea, Onela started learning about Korean culture and decided to try a semester abroad in South Korea at Korea University through TEAN.
Onela arrived in South Korea last semester and faced the same struggles most study abroad students face: culture shock, language barriers, unfamiliar people and different environments. With no friends or family there, Onela eventually figured it out and flourished.
“I was in survival mode,” he said. “I learned a lot about myself, how to be happy, to be less lonely, so I felt like I was leaving a place where I was making a niche.”
Onela heard about the coronavirus breakout in Wuhan, China through the news; the same way most Americans did.
As the virus spread in China, Onela was still living as normal in South Korea. His friends were going out to dinner, seeing movies and going to classes. Sure, people in South Korea were wearing masks, but in a country with high levels of air pollution, that was typical.
Months and weeks went on and life stayed the same with minor changes here and there. At the end of January, when South Korea confirmed the first case of the disease caused by the coronavirus, COVID-19, almost everyone wore face masks, the population in tourist areas dwindled and the government started to restrict travel.
“If I’m being honest, I was never concerned,” Onela said. “I wasn’t too concerned for my own health.”
It wasn’t until February that the virus gained traction in the country. Within a month, the confirmed cases of COVID-19 jumped from one to over 300.
On February 25th, TEAN sent their students an email about the cancellation of their program. While the email encouraged students to leave Seoul by the end of the week, many students still weren’t concerned.
“We were going to gamble with it and stay,” Onela said. “Then, we started thinking about the worst possible consequences and soon my friends’ universities said ‘no, don’t stay at all.’”
Alongside his new international friends, Onela made plans to return to the US. “I was too scared to gamble my future for one semester.”
Onela returned to the US and immediately entered a 14-day self-quarantine as recommended by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
The panic surrounding COVID-19 in the US surpassed the panic Onela witnessed in South Korea. “It’s either jokes or huge assumptions,” Onela said. “It kinda angered me.”
His advisor helped him figure out his academics because Korea University and UWM operate on different academic calendars.
Onela enrolled in half-semester online classes so he could remain a full-time student without paying back his student loans or losing financial aid.
Following spring break, many UWM students can expect to move to online classes like Onela.
Onela is nearing the end of his self-quarantine period and has had no symptoms of COVID-19.