What COVID-19 Means for Students and Educators w/ Justin Nguyen of GetChoGrindUp

Reshaping Education - Online Education, Cohort-based Courses, Bootcamps, and More

NOTE: The following is an AI-powered transcription of Justin and I's conversation. It likely contains many errors:

GetChoGrindUp (Justin Nguyen) Interview

Ish-track: [00:00:00] What's up everybody? My name is Ish and I am the founder of virtually, and this is the virtually podcast where we discuss everything online education, including higher ed, online trade schools, bootcamps, ISA, , and so much more.

[00:00:14]This week's conversation is with Justin Nguyen of GetChoGrindUp. We talk about COVID-19 and its effect on teachers, students, and higher ed. Justin gives some great advice on what you should do if you're a student during this crisis. I hope you enjoy.

[00:00:31]Ish: [00:00:31] Hi, everyone. Uh, my name is Ish the founder and CEO of virtually, and today I'm joined by Justin Nguyen of GetChoGrindUp justin, do you want to introduce yourself.

[00:00:41] Justin: [00:00:41] Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me on. So my name is Justin N. I'm the CEO of GetChoGrindUp. And basically our goal I get your grind up is really to share to Chicos to college and we can dive a little bit more about in into that. Cause I know the whole topic of today is going to be about higher ed and everything like that.

[00:00:56] So really looking forward to that. But I guess the other side of thing that I do is lead to consulting as I've built up a huge following on that platform where I'm getting like 200,000 views every single month off of student. Uh, content, basically. So that's sort of what's fueled ghetto grind up and it's, it's been crazy to just to see the reactions of other people around the world, um, when it comes to student voices and everything like that.

[00:01:18] Ish: [00:01:18] awesome. And I definitely want to talk about get your grind up, and I think it's going to have a huge role to play in terms of like. What is the world going to look like after this and for context right now, as we're recording this, it is in the midst of the covert 19 epidemic. And to start us off, the first thing I wanted to go through was a quick timeline.

[00:01:38] Of everything that's kind of happened with COBIT, where we are now, and the implications specifically for education. I know Justin, you're in, you're in the field of education. Myself and my company, we're also in the field of education, so this has a huge kind of impact on our industries, and so I kind of want to discuss those implications, but real quick, let me let, let's start off with the timeline and kind of everything that's happened so far.

[00:02:01] So I was doing some research and New York times has this incredible article where it just goes through. The timeline of everything that's happened with coven 19 all starting with December 31st it's kinda crazy. December 31st is kind of the first milestone that they have, and that is where dozens of cases are discovered.

[00:02:16] And Wu Han, January 11th, first known death of coven, 19 January 20th first confirmed case in the United States, January 30th, uh,

[00:02:27]

[00:02:27] who, who declares a global health emergency.

[00:02:33]

[00:02:33] Yeah. By February 23rd there's a huge surge of cases in Italy. February 29th first U S death March or March 13th is when president Trump declares a national state of emergency for United States, and then March 15th to 30th is quite a blur.

[00:02:48] Like a lot of different things happens. There's mass lockdowns all around the world. Shutdown of nonessential businesses, school closures, layoffs, and this kind of idea of social distancing really takes off. And today, April 6th, we're still not at the peak. Uh, luckily quarantining is, it's shown to be effective.

[00:03:08]Um, you know, schools have been closed. Uh, and you know, everybody's working remotely and it seems like some regions are kind of like flattening out. So there's some of the quarantine efforts are really working, but a lot of places have not reached their peak and still won't for another one to two months.

[00:03:23] So now I kind of want to shift gears. I'm talking about the education side of things, and so my sister, she's, she's a junior at the university of Michigan. She left to go back to school after spring break ended March, March 7th I believe. And just about a week and a half later, she was back. Uh, back home given that schools had closed.

[00:03:43] And so as you being somebody who works very closely with students, especially college age students, what are you hearing from them? What, what is going on from their point of view.

[00:03:55] Justin-: [00:03:55] So with students, they're really scared. Um, because I've seen, I mean, a few students have reached out to me saying, Hey, Justin, uh, how would you go about the whole covert thing that's going on right now?

[00:04:05] Because I had an internship that was set for the summer, but now they just retracted it and I'm not necessarily doing that internship anymore, or they're really in this. Space of, I don't even know my internship is going to happen, and it's been really crazy to look at it from my perspective because I'm not necessarily a student anymore, but I still feel empathy for them because it's like.

[00:04:24] I couldn't imagine that you worked so hard throughout the year, right? To get that internship at this great company, and then all of a sudden because of things that aren't really in your control, you can't go to that internship anymore. It's just been canceled for no reason. So it's been, it's been wild to hear some of the stories.

[00:04:40] I've heard people that just got their internship cut. I've heard. People that are especially like international students are really effected by this whole thing. Um, I know. So I hopped on a call with someone and she's really struggling to find that internship over the summer because of her international status.

[00:04:54] And it's been really interesting. But what I can say is there is a light in this sort of whole coven 19 thing for students, and if you know how to navigate it the right way, it can actually really benefit your career in the long run.

[00:05:10] Ish-: [00:05:10] Yeah. And I totally see the fear as well. Uh, my, my sister, she's kinda been adjusting to online classes. Right. And so everybody's been kind of scrambling, both kind of industry. Uh, same as with higher ed, same with even teachers in universities. And, uh, it's, it's interesting cause there's a scramble happening and people just don't know what to do.

[00:05:29] I'm curious, what you've heard , how are teachers adapting to online teaching.

[00:05:33] Justin-: [00:05:33] So I've, I've got some inside sources at some schools. I reached out to them to see how like their universities are doing, and this is no real bias for me, but UCF surprisingly has been pretty good in their transition, but that's mainly because they've had a lot of online courses previously. So they've done like online degrees as well as my sophomore and junior year of college, we have something called like lecture capture.

[00:05:58] So instead of having to go to class every single day. What they would do for the big lecture classes. So just think of like marketing one Oh one or bio one Oh one or anything like that. But they would do is you can go to class, but there's only 300 seats in the class and there's like 1200 students in the class.

[00:06:15] So what they did was they would record the lecture and put it online so you can either watch it live. Or you could watch it, um, later on in day at anytime that you wanted. So that was great for me because I use it t...