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Adjusting to Graduate School in a Pandemic

Beginning graduate studies can prove challenging, even under the best of circumstances. The rise of COVID-19 was an unexpected wrench in the academic plans of many graduate students. For some students entering graduate school in fall 2020, the pandemic delayed their move to Gainesville. And many students — whether they were just beginning graduate school or wrapping up — had to dramatically adjust their research plans.

Claudia Garnica Díaz (PhD student with Dr. Grace John)

Claudia Garnica Díaz
Claudia Garnica Díaz

Claudia Garnica Díaz completed her master’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico-Magayüez and returned to her home in Colombia before beginning her PhD studies at UF in fall 2020. Although she was able to move to Gainesville to start her first semester in person, adapting to life in a new country is never easy, and Claudia’s move came with an additional challenge.

“This was the first time I was exposed to an environment completely in English,” she said, “and it was very difficult to understand someone talking through a mask.”

The accessibility of course materials was pivotal to her success, she said, particularly class recordings. “During my first semester, as soon as I came back home, I just listened to the recordings again and tried to understand my ‘Spanglish’ notes,” she said.

The pandemic did have a silver lining for Claudia, however: It gave her time to hone new techniques to leverage in her research on leaf physiology. Claudia’s research explores the functional diversity of plants in extreme environments, like those adapted to arid environments or nutrient-poor serpentine soils. “The pandemic made me change my plans for the better because I spent more time playing in the lab, learning how to process and measure samples accurately before conducting fieldwork.”

She briefly summed up her experiences as a new graduate student in the Biology Department: “Starting graduate school during a pandemic, moving to a new country, adjusting to a different culture and language, and trying to meet new people (while keeping social distance) was definitely a challenge!” A feat, she said, she could not have achieved without the support of the people in her lab and other students in her cohort. “I do really appreciate all the help that I received, especially from my PI,” she said.

Steve Cassidy (PhD student with Dr. Nick Keiser) 

Steve Cassidy
Steve Cassidy holds colony nests of the social spider Stegodyphyus dumicola.

Steve Cassidy began his PhD in fall 2019 and was conducting fieldwork abroad in March 2020 when COVID-19 restrictions forced him to abruptly change his plans.

“I had intended on working in two different community ecology projects involving spiders: one native to Florida, causing trophic cascades, and a behavioral disease ecology project on social spiders in southern Africa,” he said. “One of the main reasons I joined the Keiser lab was to work with social spiders.”

COVID-19 was just emerging on the global scene when Steve traveled to Africa for his fieldwork. “I began work in Namibia at the of end February 2020, but unfortunately the global pandemic exploded as I was setting up an experiment in a remote desert,” he said.

As countries began to go into lockdown and impose travel restrictions, Steve was unsure about the fate of his research, and ultimately, he had to return to the US. “Instead of doing a week at four different sites across the country, I was able to get four days of data at a single site before I had to return home.”

Steve fears that his opportunity to work with social spiders may have closed for the time being. “Since international travel has been out of the question, I am unsure if I will work with the social spiders again,” he said. He has shifted his efforts to his other project on native spiders in Florida. We hope that Steve will someday get to pursue his research in southern Africa. For now, it will be exciting to see what he uncovers about local spiders and their effects on Florida’s ecosystems.

Zuania Colón-Piñeiro (PhD student with Dr. Ana Longo)

Zuania Colón-Piñeiro
Zuania Colón-Piñeiro holds a barking tree frog (Hyla gratiosa).

Zuania Colón-Piñeiro began her PhD in fall 2020, but she opted to stay in Colombia and take courses remotely until she could travel to Gainesville safely. “I was out of the country when the fall semester started, so I took courses online,” she said. “I think that worked OK with one of the courses because it was theoretical.”

However, she found that even with online accommodations, distance still impacted her ability to acquire some skills. “The second course that I took was more hands-on, but I did not have the opportunity to visit the facilities,” she said. “Therefore, I lost the in-person training, which I still need to process CT scans of frog specimens for my dissertation.”

Her biggest challenge though, was a sentiment shared throughout the Department of Biology: the lack of in-person social events. “The most difficult part for me was being unable to socialize with people from the department. Social events are how you meet your department and professors to form your committee.”

Zuania researches the functional morphology and development of direct-developing frogs in her native Puerto Rico. In addition to delaying her move to Gainesville, travel restrictions also postponed her fieldwork in Puerto Rico. “My idea was to start visiting field locations and collect preliminary data on coquí frogs, which was impossible due to the pandemic restrictions to travel,” she said.

She plans to begin fieldwork this summer after spending part of the spring semester familiarizing herself with a new system to measure the metabolic cost of development in coquí frogs across gradients of disease intensity and elevation.

Despite the setbacks, Zuania remains optimistic and credits her professors for their teaching efforts during the pandemic, “I think that the most important thing has been the flexibility and understanding of the professors,” she said.

Return to the Spring/Summer 2021 newsletter