Acceptance to LCT and deferral

One day in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, I got an email saying I had been accepted to the LCT Master.

 {as you will see, it was not so easy}

In that email, I was also informed that I had gotten one of the scholarships assigned to my region (Latin America), and that my universities wer

• Université de Lorraine in France for the 1st year
  
• Universidad del País Vasco in Spain for the 2nd year
  

Yet the uncertainty of the pandemic made it impossible to enjoy the news that much.

At this moment of the pandemic, no one knew if a vaccine was going to be possible, how long where borders going to be closed, nor if life was ever going to be the same.

 

For a couple of months we, the admitted students, received emails and attended meetings with the LCT Coordinator and Secretary. 

No one knew what to do.

 

Little by little, along the months, the new picture was starting to get clear: classes were going to be remote. 

• Problem 1: scholarships could only be given if you were inside the european union.
• Problem 2: time zones would make it so many people had classes at impossible times.

In my situation, most of my classes would have been after midnight, and for that, I would have to leave my job and thus have no income because I couldn't get to Europe because Peru closed its borders.

This situation was somewhat widespread among the admitted students for the LCT 2020 batch.

Finally, around June, the impasse was broken by an exceptional offer:

After many deliberations, the European Union decided that students admitted to Erasmus programs could defer their admissions for a year, and that scholarships would not be affected.

So, with a heavy heart, I deferred my studies for a year.

I kept my job and moved out of my parents house.

Then I arranged to do my work part-time and used the extra time to do some projects I had postponed during university, and some new projects

• got back into biking
• started learning French
• got back into learning Latin
• eventually got back into swimming
• got back to playing wind instruments by learning to play the Quena
• somewhat improved my cooking abilities 
• attended linguistic classes and read linguistic papers
• and the most important one:
  I started therapy with a trusted psychologist.
  Oh how much help has that been! :)
  

While having the time to do stuff that I wanted to do, plus having the luck to keep my job during the pandemic, I managed to get a livable 2020, with a Master's waiting for me in 2021.

 Finally, I got my acceptance letters:

1. one from the European Union 
2. one from my assigned French University