Category Archives: Graduate Studies in the Time of Coronavirus

ACTIVISM IN A CRISIS: ORGANIZING, ADVOCACY & COALITION BUILDING

Graduate Studies in the Time of Coronavirus, Part III

Edited by Didem Uca, with support from the members of the CSGSH

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered all aspects of society in North America and around the globe, including higher education. The Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities recently invited graduate students to share reflections on how this situation has affected them both personally and professionally. We will be sharing these perspectives over the course of several weeks, beginning with our first post on the importance of fostering empathy and community and our second post on mental health struggles and survival strategies.

The third part of the series amplifies the voices of graduate student organizers and activists. Their perspectives are micro and macro, ranging from setting boundaries to foster work-life balance, to setting more flexible policies in their own classrooms, to setting demands through campus-wide advocacy. Their calls to action highlight graduate students’ unique positionality as students, instructors, and researchers, providing recommendations for how administrators and faculty can better support them through this time of increased precarity and hardship.

 

Alba Isabel Lamar

Ph.D. Student in Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education, Michigan State University

Pronouns: They/She

I am from Manabí land and people, Indigenous to Abya Yala. I pay deepest respect to the past-present-future Lənape Haki-nk people and elders and ancestors, on whose land I was born and have settled. I acknowledge and offer deep gratitude to Lenapehoking and water, which nourishes my wellness and being daily, as I stand in solidarity with the folxs most marginalized and disenfranchised in society.

Ironically, the current crisis has helped me refocus my life by centering the principle that Johanna Hedva highlighted: “If only some of us are well, none of us are.” Though there is much trepidation in all of us, I am finding strength in the global collective efforts towards justice. Because it is my praxis to uplift my intersectional, interrelated communities on Pachamama, I work in solidarity with abolitionist movements towards Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty. Via Zoom with thousands worldwide, each week we dream together about the futures we deserve. With various social and environmental justice groups, I have been collaborating to organize, mobilize and hold teach-ins and workshops to develop concrete actions to ameliorate some of the woes our communities are currently facing. During this time, we are offering material support for working-class families of Color by fundraising and sharing and delivering food, wellness resources, virtual workshops, and providing other requested supports.

Sadly, COVID-19 has taken five elders of our community due to social inequities rooted in colonialism that create conditions where Afro Indigenous people have the least access to healthcare and resources. Needless to say, it has been difficult to grade student work while also reading, analyzing data and writing my netnographic dissertation research, which entails learning from the tattoo narratives of Black and Indigenous women to build Tattoo Studies curricula. Just as I began feeling overwhelmed with grief about our loss and anxious about my dissertation and my two part-time jobs, I decided to take action. To alleviate some of the stress for the undergrads I teach, I totally changed the structure of the class. My students can now submit anything course-related once a week in an online discussion board in whatever format they choose–– I encourage creativity––for full points.

My students have shown much appreciation for my flexibility during this time and also helped me realize that we cannot go back “to the way things were,” because inequity was the norm. Today, I continue to learn and build with other fighters for the future we deserve. I am proud to be a part of seeding a more nourished and nurtured future for the 99%.

 

Helen Stuhr-Rommereim

Ph. D. Candidate in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania

This crisis has caused enormous, diverse hardships for graduate students, myself included––from lost access to labs and libraries, to lost time doing research abroad, and lost funding for that time. I have lost four months of funding and five months that I intended to spend conducting research abroad. I’m lucky in that, thanks to family support and some well-timed copy-making, I can keep working and I have a place to live. But my situation is not unique. Many graduate students have been put in extremely precarious positions by this crisis. This situation offers insight into why graduate students need 1) mechanisms for asserting our interests beyond hoping for the benevolence of administrators (a union), and 2) to be considered employees.

Turning back the tenure clock for junior faculty and extending grad student funding are different things from the administrative perspective, although it is basically the same problem that is solved in the same way––with time and money.  But, while “turning back the clock” for TT faculty is free and even saves money, extending funding for Ph.D. candidates costs quite a bit. It’s money the institution could certainly find, but is extremely unlikely to without the kind of pressure that only a union can exert. Yet institutions fight graduate student unionization efforts by telling us that unions are for people who don’t have it as good as we do. They further use this strategy as a way of dividing the potential bargaining unit: some among us have it better than others. Those in a more favorable position shouldn’t risk losing that position. But the point of a union is that we  cannot assert our collective interests without collective bargaining. This crisis has both clarified our collective interests, and our inability to assert them without a base of power. Various student council organizations, often held up as our voice in the institution, can do nothing except send out endless emails saying that they are “here for us” and we are “in this together.” I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m honestly tired of it. We don’t need emotional support from the grad student councils; we need emergency material support from the institution, and they, like any employer, are unlikely  to decide to give it to us of their own volition.

This is also why graduate students need to be considered employees. While I’ve lost four months of income, I likely can’t apply for unemployment, because I’m not technically employed, I just have expenses covered by fellowships and grants. We’ve been told that it’s good for us that our fellowships aren’t taxed. But this actually creates endless confusion when we do file taxes, as people do it all different kinds of ways, some paying $0, others thousands of dollars they didn’t expect to pay, because there are no guidelines and the institution categorically exempts itself from providing advice. The institution saves money this way––they don’t pay unemployment insurance, for example. And, of course, it provides grounds for arguing that we are students and thus cannot unionize. I would love to just have taxes taken out of my stipend, get a tax return, qualify for unemployment, and be able to unionize! Without the status of employees, graduate students, who are adult professionals with families, expenses, care responsibilities, and the same need that everyone has to try to save and create some kind of safety net for themselves, end up being excluded from every legible category that could qualify them for aid, seemingly even under the new expanded unemployment benefits. 

There are many, many, many people suffering right now. I feel excruciatingly aware of that. I’m grateful to have a place to live to get through this and enough personal backstops that I’m not going to fall off a financial cliff. My program and my advisors are supportive and understanding, and trying to help all of us however they can. I appreciate it enormously. I am also heartened to see efforts from the MLA and others that articulate the needs of junior and contingent faculty and graduate students. I have to admit that in many ways, the conversation about unionization at this particular moment is moot. Graduate students who are not currently unionized are likely not going to be able to do so for a long while. Nonetheless, it is worth taking note of how useful a union would be in managing a crisis like this one, so that we can push for unionization when conditions are more favorable in the future. In the meantime, we will have to develop innovative means of collective organizing in order to assert our most urgent needs to our institutions. 

 

Anonymous 

I submitted my dissertation in late March, two weeks after beginning to shelter in place. Finishing now may not be wise, but I set this goal, so I’ll meet it. Obedience to arbitrary deadlines is my coping strategy when life seems out of control. Grad school taught me that, but it’s sound advice for pandemics, too. I had hoped that the time before I defended would offer an intellectual reset. I imagined reading broadly or dreamily drafting publications. Instead, I’ve been working with colleagues to pressure our university to recognize its moral responsibility towards grad students in this crisis.

I’m a Ph.D. candidate at a private university with a gargantuan endowment, an organizer with our grad unionization campaign, and a dues-paying member of AFT-Academics, the national higher education association of the American Federation of Teachers. My fellow organizers and I fight to hold administrators accountable to graduate employees, and have only redoubled our efforts in recent weeks. Based on our colleagues’ testimonials of their hardships, we developed a slate of proposals and collected hundreds of signatures on our petition to the administration. In addition to guarantees of healthcare coverage and emergency relief, we are pushing our university to stop the clock for all graduate students, extending enrollment and funding for a year in recognition of universal disruption and delays. We’re fortunate that our university has the resources to support this.. It should be trivial for such a wealthy institution to protect its community from the financial consequences of the pandemic and looming economic collapse.

Instead, the university has made its stance clear: We are acceptable sacrifices to the wellbeing of its endowment. They announced that graduate students may petition their departments for extensions, a week after warning all staff to trim budgets in preparation for future cuts. This is not relief. It is an assertion that graduate workers are expendable, and a shameless strategy for fracturing our collective power. And it is working. Alongside my efforts with our union, the colleagues from my dissertation completion fellowship cohort came together to request a short-term contract extension from the on-campus institute that funds us. Library closures make it impossible for many of us to finish on our planned timelines, and cancelled searches and rescinded offers mean that those who do finish face the prospect of graduating into a pandemic, unemployed and uninsured. Overcoming worries about speaking up from a position of precarity, my colleagues made our case to the program director, whose anodyne response showed he’d barely heeded our letter. If the university signals that it bears no responsibility towards us, why should any program or department act differently?

But we do not accept this brutal status quo. My union and others across the country are holding today as a Day of Action to force our administrations to face the reality of our needs and we are encouraged by recent successes at other institutions. A generation of graduate workers face declining job prospects, if they can even finish their degrees in the face of austerity and spending cuts. This problem is especially acute for our colleagues at public universities and less well-resourced private institutions. But the abysmal response from many of the wealthiest schools proves that the real problem is not financial. It’s that many university leaders don’t truly espouse the ideals of community they so often preach. As I grapple with the realization that my academic career may be ending before it began, I realize that the grad student’s old joke was prophetic. A lot of schools like mine aren’t universities at all; they’re hedge funds that offer classes to maintain their tax-exempt status.

 

Ariadne Wolf

Member of the CSGSH

https://ariadnewolf.com

Now that we are all obligated to work remotely, it seems that there is more pressure than ever to relax some of the educational and professional boundaries typically in place. Perhaps your supervisor at work wants to call you at all hours to discuss your performance; perhaps your student wishes for an extension on a project due before shelter-in-place went into effect; perhaps your colleagues wish to meet daily, rather than weekly, and you feel this is excessive. Now that we are all socially deprived, there is more impetus to schedule lengthy and arguably unnecessary check-ins, to relax our grading policies and procedures––in short, to confuse kindness for a simple confusion about the obligations and responsibilities we have to ourselves in this time of crisis. 

If you are feeling any of these pressures, you are not alone. It is easy for all of us to accidentally find ourselves taking advantage of each other emotionally, particularly when perhaps the only interaction some of us have all day happens online or via Zoom. Nonetheless, it remains vitally important to keep ourselves healthy by maintaining our own professional and personal boundaries. I would recommend the following strategies for boundary setting: Do not give out your personal contact information to students. Schedule your meetings at precise times, rather than permitting yourself to be available all day long. Draw boundaries around both your effort and your work product, just as you would in an office environment, whether that means closing the door on your partner for a few hours or asking your teenage son to walk your dog so that you can grade papers.

Remember: You are important, your health is important, and, in the midst of all this chaos, it is more important than ever before to remain sane, centered, and calm. This means being clear about what others can expect from you, as well as what you can expect from yourself.

Mental Health Struggles and Survival Strategies

Graduate Studies in the Time of Coronavirus, Part II

Edited by Didem Uca, with support from the members of the CSGSH

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered all aspects of society in North America and around the globe, including higher education. The Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities recently invited graduate students to share reflections on how this situation has affected them both personally and professionally. We will be sharing these perspectives over the course of several weeks, beginning with last week’s post on the importance of fostering empathy and community at this crucial moment.

The second part of the series offers powerful testimonies from three graduate students as they cope with the mental health effects of the sudden and unexpected changes in their lives at work and at home. They share personal strategies they have developed to support their well being while managing multiple, competing demands on their time and attention. This post offers a mere snapshot of the impacts of this crisis on graduate student mental health. Many struggle in silence, not feeling comfortable to share their experiences due to stigmas associated with mental health issues. Many face a new or ongoing lack of access to resources to support the management of these issues, further exacerbating an already difficult situation. We therefore urge instructors, advisors, mentors, and supervisors of graduate students to be mindful of how the pandemic could be affecting graduate students’ mental health. Check in with your graduate students to see how they are doing––not just as scholars or teachers, but as people. It can make a world of difference.

 

Chrissie Andreou Maroulli

Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Cyprus

Euphoria

March 16th. I am teaching an online drama lesson. I am holding my daughter, who is screaming bloody murder, while I try to explain to twelve-year-olds what “characterization” is. She lifts my shirt to breast-feed, verbally and physically demanding milk. I hang up in terror. An uncontrollable force takes over me. I put the baby down, grab the doorknob and start banging the bedroom door onto the wall uncontrollably. My partner, who is in the next room on an online lesson of his own, thankfully realizes something is wrong and rushes in. Meanwhile my entire body is seizing. Not knowing what to do, he slaps me to try to calm me down. It doesn’t help. Eventually the panic attack fades out and I feel empty. 

Since the lockdown was enforced in Cyprus, we have to look after our baby around the clock; daycare is closed and our parents are not allowed to visit. We work from home while a bored two-year-old is constantly in the room. Since she sees me all the time, weaning has gone out the window; she wants to breastfeed constantly, which has me in tears from aggravation and pain. Most of our private students lost their jobs, so they have “temporarily” dropped out. Our rent is now higher than our income. We also recently found out that my father has lung cancer and have not been able to see him yet. 

The demanding baby needs to be entertained constantly. Mum needs to find solutions. We start baking. I have never baked this much. She loves it! We cook, one, two, three times a day. We sit at the table and eat as a family. We draw, sculpt, sing and dance, read, sink our hands into tubs of rice and giggle. She is happier than she has ever been. She infects us with her laughter. Somehow I finish writing a chapter for publication. I pre-record my lessons and make online teaching work. I continue enthusiastically working on my Ph.D. I think I am thriving.

I have never seen this much of my partner. I like him even more now. I remember all of the reasons why I love him. I see the meaning of life. Our family.

I have absolutely no doubt that we will figure it out; God has His ways.

Eventually the panic attack fades out and I feel empty. And then I feel better; so much better.

 

Kinsey Potter

Master’s of Professional & Technical Communications in English student, Tennessee Technological University

Twitter: @kinsey_potter

Digital Portfolio: https://kinseypotter.wordpress.com/

When the novel coronavirus forced the world to begin cycles of handwashing and daily cleaning, those of us with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) revisited personal rituals that we had overcome weeks, months, or years ago. As a graduate student in my first semester and someone who was diagnosed with OCD at a very young age, I have had to teach myself how to function remotely while also reteaching myself how to fight previously overcome compulsions. OCD seems to be the role model of what to do in a pandemic, and within only three weeks I am feeling exposed while my buried compulsions return. 

I finished a seminar paper shortly before I convinced myself that I killed my 60-year-old neighbor by shaking his hand—he’s alive, yet I obsess that he isn’t. Since the media echoes OCD thoughts that to not clean is to kill, I have thrown my previously minimized cleaning routines into the trash as I clean the kitchen for the fifth time in one day. We with OCD typically spend every day treating our compulsions through developing routines proving that if we do not conduct certain rituals, then nothing bad will happen. Yet pandemics prove to us that something bad will happen, and our minds whisper I told you so. Since the pandemic began, and even before stay-at-home orders and remote learning were put in place, I began to listen to that voice. I have revisited compulsions that I overcame at ten years old, I will not leave the house, and I am beginning to have to disclose that I have OCD with those in my personal and academic lives who had been unaware. The internet is making fun of us with #OCD due to society’s newly enforced cleaning habits, and the news is giving us an excuse to listen to the voice of compulsions.

Despite these significant challenges, I continue channeling my OCD into academia. Three papers written, one article submitted to a journal, and multitudes of emails sent from a frenzied state at my three-times-dusted-already-today computer. Yet, I am struggling to end the semester both successfully ahead in my program of study and not negatively behind in my process of overcoming OCD rituals. Because of COVID-19, I will receive not only an M.A. in English in 1.5 years, but I will hopefully earn the words I overcame my disorder in full capacity again, as I began to do 13 years ago.

 

Peyton Sibert

Master’s of Professional Writing student, Kennesaw State University

Twitter: @PeytonLane96

Website: peytonspages.com

At the beginning of March, COVID-19 did not seem like a problem in Metro-Atlanta. My partner, however, who resides in South Florida and has had a plan for the zombie apocalypse for as long as I’ve known her, told me to stay safe. While I was working at my university’s writing center five days later, my campus announced that face-to-face classes would cease for two days. Nonetheless, I still did not grasp the gravity of the situation until that evening when I witnessed the type of mass hysteria that I thought only existed in movies at the local supermarket. Dented cans and discarded items were tossed onto the otherwise empty shelves. People tried to avoid human contact, despite their carts serving as bumper cars in the aisles. Suddenly, my partner’s worries did not seem outlandish. Shoving my shopping list into my pocket, I grabbed the last loaf of overpriced, organic bread and searched for cans that were not too dented. 

For another week, the coffee shop where I also work stayed open; I washed my hands incessantly. When a temporary closure was announced, I was grateful because my fear grew with each new report of cases. When my campus announced that the rest of the semester would be conducted online, I secluded myself in my apartment. As a graduate teaching assistant, I adapted to tutoring solely online and have begun to wonder what I will do as the instructor of record if this continues into the fall. Planning my units for my first semester of teaching is daunting enough without having to consider a global pandemic. 

I have been reworking my unit plan, planning my capstone, researching Ph.D. programs, and reintroducing myself to the importance of mental health. At a time where I could allow my anxiety to control everything, I am challenging myself to become mindful of my stress by practicing daily yoga and walking around a local cemetery. The cemetery offers a level of peace that I cannot find in my neighborhood. The silence overpowers my worries, so that I can embrace the beauty of nature and the seemingly perfect marble gravestones. Although I hope to soon engage with others face to face, I am appreciative of this time of solitude, when I can delve into my thoughts about teaching, as well as reflect upon what I can and cannot control in my academic future. I never would have imagined that COVID-19 would make my partner’s plan for the apocalypse feel like a reality––despite the lack of zombies. 

 

Seeking Empathy & Community

Graduate Studies in the Time of Coronavirus, Part I

Edited by Didem Uca, with support from the members of the CSGSH

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered all aspects of society in North America and around the globe, including higher education. The Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities asked graduate students to submit short reflections on how this situation has affected the core aspects of their scholarly lives––from coursework and teaching to research projects and dissertation defenses––as well as the impact on their broader selves: personal well being, physical and mental health, familial and domestic responsibilities, financial and living situations, and any other repercussions of this crisis. We received such a tremendous response from graduate students across disciplines and around the U.S. and beyond that we decided to produce a series of posts over the next several weeks on different themes, each with contributions by several graduate student writers. Our first post addresses recognizing the need for empathy and community, both for ourselves as graduate student-researcher-instructor-humans and for the students entrusted in our care. We are very grateful to everyone who was able to share their perspectives and are in solidarity with all of our colleagues around the world who have been affected. If you are struggling, we hope that these posts help you feel less alone.

 

Anonymous Contribution

I am a first-year doctoral student at an R1 university in the American south. I left my home state and traveled half a country away to attend this university, leaving behind my friends, my family, and my job security, all in an effort to achieve my PhD. I am a graduate teaching assistant at my university, on top of taking a full course load. On top of that, as I attend an R1, I am juggling the writing load of no fewer than 5 publications at any time. Nothing slowed down or stopped when we went “virtual”––if anything, people have assumed that I have more time than before, and have been asking me to complete tasks for them. I am busier than I have been in years, and most of it is the heavy lifting of other people’s needs. I haven’t had time to process how the quarantine has affected me; instead, I am setting up family Zoom meetings, editing other people’s work, and giving of myself because people ask me to, and because they are in need. I feel like that old teaching adage, where in order to light the way, a teacher needs to burn themselves out. I have nothing left, and yet I keep burning to give others light. 

Aside from my personal academic progress, I have my students to worry about. Some of them were forced to move back home to a place that is not safe, where they face food and housing insecurity, and where they worry about simply surviving. All of their classes don’t matter as much as their safety and health, and yet, I have to be that “jerk” emailing them about assignments that they need to turn in. I am one of the lucky ones, though. My supervisor and my department have been amazing through this entire debacle, and have given all of the GTAs the freedom to do what they feel is the best for their students. My supervisor checks in on me and the other students under her care, and I feel supported academically and personally. I don’t feel alone, however stressed out I may be. I don’t have anybody who I am immediately responsible for––no children or parents to care for. I settled my mental health issues prior to this, and because of that I am not reliant on therapy to function. I am one of the lucky ones, whose big complaint is that I am helping others and neglecting myself, and that is a luxury. But, this life is not easy. This is a heavy weight being placed on us all, and sometimes I want to crumble under my share of the weight. 

 

Kay Sohini

English PhD Candidate and Instructor, Stony Brook University

Twitter: @KaySohini

On March 7, when New York issued a state of emergency due to COVID-19, I was in Boston for NeMLA. It was in all likelihood the last academic conference that would not be canceled for the foreseeable future. On coming back to NYC from Boston, I stocked up on essentials and prepared to self-quarantine. My university went entirely online soon after. As movement became more and more restricted in my city and beyond, my summer research project—which required fieldwork and international travel—was canceled. It was a time-sensitive project that likely cannot be completed at a later date.

Luckily, unlike the 10 million people who filed for unemployment in March, I still receive a (albeit modest) paycheck in my role as a graduate TA/instructor of record. My university has extended our graduation timelines by one year. However, we have not heard anything so far about what that means on the funding front. Instead, there have been a flurry of webinars on the best distance learning practices and how to teach on Zoom. While these resources can be helpful, they implicitly create pressure to teach synchronously (which my university initially required, before eventually pulling back on it). In my experience, that is no longer a viable option. Undergraduate students are dealing with employment loss, have precarious living situations, and some even have to care for their families. I suppose it is important for universities to maintain a semblance of normalcy during these trying times, for both morale and fiscal reasons. Regarding the latter, perhaps we (graduate instructors, contingent faculty) are beneficiaries too, inasmuch as we would be the first ones to lose our paychecks in the event of universities losing money. 

Nevertheless, to insist on normalcy when there is a global pandemic, to assume that all students have the emotional (and technological) bandwidth to deal with synchronous modes of instruction compromises on the values that the humanities espouse. Over the past week, my students have told me that some of their instructors have assigned extra work because they are no longer meeting face to face. Some have told me that their internet connectivity is not strong enough for Zoom. One student has had to pick up extra shifts at work to make ends meet. Yet another informed me that both of their parents tested positive for the virus. Personally, I lost my grandmother this week to COVID-19 related complications. I am in Queens, which has the highest number of COVID cases in the New York area. The constant sirens outside my window are deafening, and it exacts an emotional toll. So while I want to do right by my students and do my best under the circumstances, I am acutely cognizant of the fact that these are not normal circumstances— and we must adjust our standards accordingly. I understand the need for structure (provided by synchronous learning) and that it even helps some people. I understand that we cannot suspend life and work until this is all over, since we do not know when this will end. However, I also believe that we as individuals and as a community need to cultivate more empathy and compassion. Especially now.

 

Heather Stewart

PhD Candidate in Philosophy, Western University

www.heatherstewartphilosophy.com

As I sit on my bed, writing from what has now become my makeshift office, comprised of a lap desk that hadn’t been used in years and a cat who is thankful for but perhaps also confused by my suddenly being home around the clock, I reflect on the ways in which the sudden changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have radically shifted what it means to be a graduate student. Upon reflection, the thing I find myself most struck by is the sense of time––how at times it feels as if it is moving so slowly, as if I have been stuck in my one bedroom apartment for a century or more; at times it feels as if it is flying by, as I look at the clock after watching the third press conference or listening to the tenth news podcast of the day,  and somehow a whole day is gone and I feel as if I have done, or accomplished, next to nothing but still somehow feel exhausted. 

This confused sense of time––it’s being somehow simultaneously slowed down and sped up––is impacting graduate student life in myriad ways. Despite time feeling like it is frozen––like life itself is stopped in its tracks––our funding clocks tick on and progression milestones await us, unmoved. 

And while I worry about the loss of time, and how that loss ultimately presents new financial challenges or exacerbates old ones, I also reflect on how much more is being lost than time, and how reflecting on those various losses really helps to illuminate what it means to be a graduate student. Being a graduate student, stuck at home in isolation along with so many folks around the world, required to be physically distant from other people, makes salient the unique pleasures of graduate student life, which, perhaps we take for granted; but in their absence, we come to realize that these play a significant role in sustaining us, our research, and our mental health.  

If this experience of physical distancing and self-isolation teaches us anything about graduate study and the parts of it we ought to appreciate more deeply, it is that being a graduate student involves so much more than completing coursework and hitting progression benchmarks of exams and dissertations. The full experience of being a graduate student is about the creative stimulation that is driven by being part of an intellectual community and occupying communal spaces with other like-minded thinkers. It is about the feeling when you finally make something click for the student who has come to your office hours for the third time, having been ready to give up but feeling grateful that they didn’t. It is about connecting with the colleague you don’t see often when you happen to be making coffee in the department kitchen at the same time, and learning about their work, but maybe also about what their partners or kids have been up to lately. It is about your supervisor stopping by your office, not to ask about your research progress, but just to see how you are doing, as a human.

As a graduate student writing from home, disconnected from the intellectual community and creative spaces I perhaps took for granted, I realize now that so much more is being taken from me than the time that is being rapidly subtracted from my funding window. I am losing the graduate student experience itself. And like passing time, you can’t get that back. 

 

Anna Barritt

Ph.D. Candidate in English: Rhetoric and Writing Studies and Assistant Director of First-Year Composition, The University of Oklahoma

While sitting in a meeting with my writing program administrator—learning of the directives from upper-administration about the impending move to online instruction to combat COVID-19—my first thought was, “I’m going to be able to get so much reading done for my doctoral exams.” Two weeks of working from home would give me that much-needed time to focus and prepare without interruption. Though I was fully aware of the difficulties that would accompany this temporary shift, I secretly rejoiced at this time to study. 

A week into online instruction, it was announced that the remainder of this semester would be held online. My previous excitement quickly turned to concern. How does this affect my exams? How will I defend? How will I meet with my advisor? Like most institutions, we have made do by converting in-person meetings to Zoom meetings. In adjusting to this new digital normal, one thing has become clear to me: camaraderie is a grad student’s lifeline. 

So much of our career happens in isolation. We read, think, and write holed up in whatever quiet place we can find. But we come up for air to commiserate with our peers, to admit to our advisors that we’re behind schedule, to share our love of learning with our students. We desperately depend on fostering connections with the people around us to survive what is often a lonely life. This comes as a surprise to me, as I call myself an introvert and revel in the academic life of mulling over ideas while surrounded by my books. I didn’t know how reliant I was on my peers to get through the solitary environment of grad school. With every day that passes in quarantine, combined with the possibility of the fall semester also moving online, I am wondering how I can go on like this without the social aspect of talking about my research and writing. How does any of this matter if I can’t share my findings? What hope do I have of effecting change through my projects if no one hears what I have to say? My greatest insights come in spurts of kairos and are largely inspired by the people around me; I am not the island that I once thought I was. 

Sure, I’ve had more time and fewer distractions—but I’ve learned how valuable those distractions are.    

 

Jonquil S. Harris

Masters of Professional Writing Student, Kennesaw State University

Three weeks ago, life as I knew it changed personally, professionally, academically, and worldwide. I was slightly relieved when we received the call from my employer that we would be shut down for approximately two weeks. I would have a moment to catch my breath and focus even more on what brought me joy––my graduate studies. The excitement I find in being around like-minded individuals as we discuss our craft and our future as professional writers and gaining invaluable insights from professors and advisors makes the 90-minute commute to my university seem brief.

Then the reality of the pandemic sank in, and it took a week before my anxiety wore away. I couldn’t help but think about me or my family members becoming sick. I acknowledge my privilege during this time. I have a full-time job with benefits and sick and annual leave; and I have full capability to work from home until we return to a new normal. That new normal is what I cling to get me through this. Just as I am now working remotely from home, I am also attending classes remotely. I miss being in the same room as my colleagues and bouncing ideas off of one another so openly and freely. Viewing one another on split screens, trying to determine who should speak next, or losing each other to shoddy internet connections is not nearly the same as being in one another’s physical presence. 

However, I am thankful that we are still able to connect in that way, and I am now thinking even more broadly about what community means. I have seen the power of social media to aid freelancers and creatives in the way of fundraising and virtual book tours and readings.

I miss spending time with my parents, then having a long embrace before we leave one another. I miss engaging with my colleagues face-to-face. Virtual calls can only reach so far. But at this time, I worry less about being productive and more about persevering. I am thinking of resting while in a state of unrest. I am thinking about the impossible being possible.