Sure thing, I can expand on that!
At my university, you went through a bit of a filtering process:
faculty-specific shared 1st year -> department-specific 2nd year -> stream-specific 3rd/4th/5th year
I started my degree in 2019, so by the time I started 2nd year (Sept 2020), COVID lockdown was in full effect and thus all our classes were on Microsoft Teams. We (300 of us in my department but I'm sure similar servers existed for the other dozen or so departments) wanted somewhere to talk that wasn't under the control of our university and had similar features to Teams (persistent storage, searchable conversation, different channels, voice and/or video call ability, ability to join and leave and/or mute certain channels while remaining in the server).
We had an academics category (for all our classes) and a social category (because lockdown deprived us of other opportunities).
We had different channels for different classes where we posted questions for our fellow students, materials we found online which were useful, a discord bot someone programmed to remind us when homework was due and when tests or extra events were, and a couple voice chat "rooms" if we had group work to do or if you wanted to hang out and study.
The social category was similar except the channels were mostly "look how spectacularly my SolidWorks sim failed" and "here's a photo of my cat" and "anybody want to play Among Us?" and "internship search is going badly please help"
In 3rd/4th/5th year, since we specialized into streams, we added roles so we only needed to see the academic channels relevant to us. Sometimes we had Master's students in our classes too, in which case they were invited to join the specific channels for courses they shared with us.
By our 4th year, lockdown was mostly lifted so we switched to mostly in person classes, study, and social sessions, but the server was still active until the end of my 5th year.
One major advantage that only occured to me upon further reflection is that Discord does not require you to use legal names or otherwise verify your identity (I think this has recently changed? I haven't used it in like 2 years), unlike our school based accounts. Which does make it easier for bots/malicious actors to join servers, but also meant that no one in my class knew exactly who I was until the first in-person meetup by which time social relationships were already established. I was already known as the middle-of-the-grade-distribution, super-passionate-about-space, obessed-with-Star-Trek person... not "the girl" (my specific stream only had me and around 20 guys, though the overall ratio in the department was ~30/70 F/M.)
I was also 3 years younger than everyone else because I graduated high school early, and I was worried that that would negatively affect my classmates' view of my competence, but having our 2nd/3rd years online helped me hide the fact until it wasn't as relevant.
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
areudirty
snowghoul
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