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New Profs in the age of COVID19 - the series:
- by Swanne Gordon @swannegordon
- by Yoel Stuart @yestuart
- by Amy Parachnowitsch @EcoEvoAmy
- by Jaime Chaves @chavechito76
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By Jaime Chaves
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| Jaime says hi from Galapagos. (Pic by Aspen Hendry.) |
As a new pre-tenure professor
hoping to open my lab to graduate students in the next semester, I am looking
at the Fall 2020 semester with uncertainty and it seems to be a complicated
year to build up a sound Tenure-Retention-Promotion dossier. Here are some
points:
-I have accepted 4 graduate
students to start in my lab, of which three live out of state. Not only is the
housing market in California very challenging to many full-time students, but
now we must consider the present COVID-19 situation which could
also possibly hinder students’ relocations efforts.
-When interviewing the
candidates, one of the selling points to join my lab was the nature of the
program: 1/3 fieldwork, 1/3 lab work, 1/3 bioinformatics. With the current
situation, (i) fieldwork looks like something that might not happen in the near
future (international travel bans to Ecuador-Galapagos), (ii) wet lab access
could still have strong accessibility restrictions for the near future, and
(ii) long delay in data generation (thousands of genomic projects put on hold
most likely resuming activities under long queues).
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| Jaime in Galapagos. (Pic by Aspen Hendry) |
-The freezing of research
activities will put a dent in my lab's capacity to generate preliminary data,
which in turn will be essential for future grant submissions and manuscripts
production. Thus, funds to support graduate activities will be impacted and
their terminal degrees could face additional challenges.
-Masters’ students are
expected to finish their degrees in two years, which is usually the length of
external support for this type of program. All my initial graduate students are
seeking to obtain such funding so it is very probable that students might take
longer than expected given the delays I mentioned. They would likely have to
complete the program over a longer span of time which could jeopardize their
access to continued funding.
Things that students can still do while cooped up at home, besides online classes: (1) Learn stats tools such as R, and learn relevant stats techniques. They will need those tools in the end, might as well learn them up front. (2) Reading papers, reading books, thinking about questions, writing review papers where appropriate; again, might as well do this up front. (3) Simulations and modeling; why not learn how to build an evolutionary model in SLiM? (Which – notice of conflict of interest – I am the author of :->) We (the scientific community) should also be talking about virtual conferences; students could certainly benefit from "attending" such conferences, seeing and giving talks, networking virtually with people in their area, etc., just as they do at in-person conferences, but we need to learn how to do this effectively. Finally, perhaps it makes sense to try to think of fieldwork that could be done locally; obviously there are things that make a place like the Galapagos especially interesting for science, but there are perhaps also interesting research problems one could investigate locally if one brainstormed for a while. I recall Andrew has done some interesting and publishable fieldwork in the ponds at his family's winery. Think outside the box. :-> (But yes, these are going to be very tough times for students and profs alike; I don't mean to minimize that at all, but rather, to make constructive suggestions about how to make the most of a bad situation.)
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