Roaring twenties

The young adults of "generation Covid" are finally moving on with their lives, two years after the pandemic threw their plans into disarray.

- REBECCA ZHONG

NIKITA KENT, 23

Nikita Kent: “I am now 23, but I still feel like I’m 21 – like my character development has been frozen by two years.”

Before the pandemic began, Nikita Kent had her future well mapped out. In February 2020, she was based in Tokyo and about to catch a flight to Zhenjiang, China, to study Mandarin. After that, she planned to pursue her master’s in one of the world’s major cities.

As global concerns grew about the Covid outbreak in China, Kent decided to head back to Aotearoa. With limited options available, she quickly enrolled in a computer science course at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT). “Thankfully, the AUT admin staff were quick and let me enroll with really short notice.”

After five years of being away from home, she had little choice but to move back in with her parents.

While grateful she has been able to build on “hard skills” over the past two years, she is immensely relieved that New Zealand’s borders are now open again. She is due to fly back to Japan this month, where she will be studying for a master’s

in economics at the University of Tokyo on a full academic scholarship.

Kent is fi rm in her belief that “there’s so much you can learn and do while you’re young, mobile and have no dependants”. She feels, however, that she has already missed out on much of that potential growth.