Jake Aronowitz, a Ph.D. student at the University, is fascinated by birds. For three years and counting, he’s been working in the Kirn Lab, researching neurogenesis in birds and looking at how they sing. In a spacious aviary on the fourth floor of Shanklin Laboratories, between one hundred and one hundred fifty colorful zebra finches await Aronowitz every day.
“I’m really passionate about what I do, and generally speaking I don’t spend a lot of time questioning whether it’s important or not,” Aronowitz said of his research. “But I think in times of…collective unease like we have right now, it just puts in perspective the things you do, and you wonder if studying neurons in bird brains is all that important.”
The collective unease Aronowitz is referring to is the COVID-19 pandemic that led the University to transition to remote learning for the remainder of the semester. As undergraduates cope with the loss of the second half of their spring semester—and, for some, their senior spring—graduate students like Aronowitz are grappling with what this cancellation means for them. What happens to rooms full of live animals? Or research labs on the brink of incredible discoveries?
Unlike undergraduates who had to petition to stay on campus, Ph.D. and M.A. students that choose to continue work are allowed to stay in their on-campus housing in order to take care of their labs. According to Director of Graduate Student Services Cheryl-Ann Hagner, about 60 graduate students who live on campus are staying.
“[They can] remain in their housing because most graduate students live here year-round and it is their only home,” Hagner said. “They work for Wesleyan, and that stipend covers their living expenses, so without an income that would be impossible.”
On Monday, March 23, all Wesleyan graduate students received an email from the Chair of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics Department Joseph Knee urging students to stay at home, whether it be in housing on campus or elsewhere. The email was prompted by Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont’s statewide “Stay Safe, Stay Home” executive order instructing all non-essential workers to work from home.
“The gist of [Knee’s] message is for graduate students and faculty to find an appropriate stopping point for their research,” M.A. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry student Mackenzie Mitchell, who works in the MacQueen Lab, said. “In the event an experiment has already been started and will be ruined by stopping now or if the lab work uses an animal model that requires ongoing attention, you can work until you’ve reached a better place to pause.”
However, most student lab work at the University has been forced to stop because of its non-essential status.
“Even so, it’s advised that minimal people occupy lab space to observe the social distancing, so my understanding is that faculty may take over these high-priority experiments,” said Mitchell. “Via the governor’s mandate Wesleyan’s research labs are ‘non-essential,’ we don’t study coronavirus, so we’ll have to stop for the time being.”
Despite this mandate from the government, Hagner said that there are important distinctions in student work that allow some to stay on campus.
“We recognize that every experiment that is happening is important to the people who are doing it, but if there’s a live animal then it’s important to the animal too, not just for the experimenter,” Hagner said. “We are relying on the faculty advisors to make good decisions in consultation with the graduate students about keeping the students safe and deciding what work absolutely must go on for the safety of the animals.”
Since Aronowitz works with live animals, he is one of the students that must be on campus to get his lab work done.
“[The University advised] that all of us work from home if we could…but I don’t really have much I can do at home,” Aronowitz said. “My experiments are all in the lab, whether it’s doing surgeries, staining tissue, or cutting brains.”
Aronowitz says he is able to continue social distancing while working in his lab.
“I can come in and out [of the fourth floor of Shanklin] without seeing anybody, and that is the only reason why I feel like it is safe for me to keep coming,” Aronowitz said. “I can wash off my door handles and use hand sanitizer, and I don’t have to see anybody unless I choose to go down to other floors.”
Additionally, there are animal care staff that move between Shanklin and Judd Hall to feed, clean, and care for the animals. Students like Aronowitz are there as a backup, to ensure that the animals are taken care of.
“If [the animal care workers] get sick with COVID-19 and they can’t come in, I’ve been given the instructions on how to care for the entire bird colony,” Aronowitz said. “We’ll do what has to be done because the animals already do so much for us and they make a great sacrifice, so we want to make sure they’re taken care of.”
Rest assured: All the Wesleyan lab rats—and lab birds—are safe, as are the jobs of the students who work with them.
“To me, the biggest thing is that I didn’t get fired,” Aronowitz said. As a Ph.D. student, he’s paid by the University. “Lots of people lost their jobs during this…. The University has been extremely supportive in terms of letting me keep my job and not just locking the doors of my lab and saying, ‘Come back in two months.’”
While Aronowitz and others remain on campus, many graduate students have chosen to return home to complete their work remotely. However, this comes with many obstacles.
“I need humans to do my research,” Kinsey Yost, an M.A. student in Neuroscience and Behavior, said. Yost works in Professor Sanislow’s Cognitive, Affective, and Personality Science Lab. “I need brains to come in and participate in the work to collect data, and without being able to work one-on-one with these people…. You can’t collect that data.”
Yost said she was lucky to collect a good amount of data in the fall, but without having the opportunity to keep researching and collaborating, the process of getting her thesis done from home has become complicated.
Lucas Mani, a Chemistry M.A. student working in the Westmoreland Lab, is also working on his thesis from home. Like Yost, he had more research to do on campus and now has to find another way to deepen his learning remotely.
“Because I can’t actually run any experiments, I’m really trying to immerse myself in the literature and really work on writing my background information,” Mani said. “So that when I do return, I can really just pick up right where I left off and be better prepared and really understand everything that I’ve been doing.”
Mani also had permission to stay at the University for his lab, but he chose to go home.
“I just didn’t really feel comfortable being three thousand miles away from my family [at] this time,” Mani said.
Although faced with a frustrating situation, students agree that the Graduate Program has been extremely accommodating.
“Throughout all of this and up until now they’ve been sending lots of helpful emails…. They were sending emails about how Usdan would be open, grocery shuttles, late night shuttles,” Mitchell said. “They sent low-cost high-speed internet for students, which is super nice and accessible.”
Mitchell emphasized the importance of appreciating all the help and resources she’s been offered as a graduate student.
“I think that this process has been hard in general because everything is evolving day by day,…but I think for how dynamic this has been, the Grad association has been super super helpful,” Mitchell said. “They’ve sent thesis writing support things along, Zoom links…. They’ve been fantastic with resources and supporting the grad students who are still on campus in this very tumultuous time.”
Still, there’s concern from administrators about making sure students can move forward in their professional lives.
“So much of our [Graduate Studies Program] work is done in person, especially as people complete their degree and are doing their defenses and getting all the signatures they need…. Our initial push was to figure out how to transfer all of those things to electronic processes,” Hagner said. “Many of them [students] have jobs and next steps, and it’s important that they not get held up.”
On the other hand, Mani is looking at this situation not as an obstacle, but an opportunity.
“After seventeen years of education, there is this feeling of being burnt out, and I really want to always really love what I’m doing,” Mani said. “And so I think that having this time to be home and slow down and spend time reading books and catching up with my family…is actually a wonderful excuse to have this R&R that I [started] to feel this yearning for.”
Mani mentioned that taking this time away from his resume wouldn’t hurt him.
“I think in the future no one’s gonna say, ‘What did you do during this semester, why do you have this blank space in your resume?’” Mani said. “Because I can just say, ‘Oh, coronavirus,’ and no one’s gonna hold that against me, which I think is a small positive in a large world of negatives.”
Hagner, too, is focusing on the positives.
“[We] expect that the alternative processes that we have in place are imperfect, but they at least keep things moving, [and] people aren’t stuck,” Hagner said. “They’re not ideal, but they will work, and [we are] finding out that sweet spot between what can we do that works, and how much can we expect even though it’s not ideal.”
Hagner, above all, feels optimistic.
“We feel hopeful.” Hagner said. “It’s the great unknown, right?”
Hallie Newman can be reached at hnewman@wesleyan.edu.