Zooming through Grad School: A Beginning

I am by no means the first one to say that 2020 has been a crazy year, with the global pandemic grinding the world and everyone’s plans down to a halt. I was a college senior at the time when the pandemic hit the United States, and on my way to graduate school. I remember my first experience with the pandemic actually being related to grad school when I decided to not attend my visit days in Seattle for the University of Washington. Having said that, I consider myself a lot more fortunate than some of my other fellow seniors, who had job offers lined up only to be rescinded as the pandemic led to financial challenges in their companies. In many ways, I was lucky to have my future plans set in stone before the pandemic hit: I was going to pursue a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Design at the University of Washington, Seattle!

Fast forward several months, and I sit here today at the end of my first quarter of graduate school, completely online, in a new city without knowing anyone in it. I hope to document this experience as just a memory, but in the event that others in the months to come may find themselves in similar shoes as mine, I will also talk about the forces that got me through these months of school so that it may be of some help to them.

A day in the life

A typical day in the week usually began with me waking up in the morning and putting on a pot of coffee before I even brushed my teeth. My most helpful morning companion, my Google Home, read my calendar to me and played some morning Kesha (a sure-fire way to wipe out the last bits of sleep away from my eyes). Seriously, my Google Home has been a literal lifesaver at times, reminding me of events, playing my favorite music, and in general serving as “someone” to talk to at random times during the day. The immediate next thing I would do, even before checking my morning emails and socials, is preparing breakfast. I realized, especially later on in the quarter as the full effect of the isolation set in, any emails I responded to did not fully capture what I would have ideally intended as a response: I’d either leave something out or my wording would be cloudy. This quarter fully taught me the importance of an early and filling breakfast, especially in a fully virtual world.

I would typically have a class or meeting very soon after finishing breakfast, making these some of the most productive ones I would have all day. Since most of my classes were all with the same set of people (my cohort of incoming Ph.D. students), there were moments of exchanging greetings and checking in with each other, all of which at the start of my workday were incredibly helpful. I usually had some time off after my first class, about an hour on average, and this became a very important break time for me. On most days, I spent this time playing the online mobile game Among Us with my childhood friends from India. These game times were an incredibly important part of my routine because it allowed me several stress-releasing activities: 1)being able to talk to actual people, 2) being able to talk in my mother tongue, Bengali, and 3) not having to think about school/research for a while. I made sure not to multitask during these game periods in order to allow my mind to rest. On days when we would not be playing, I would take a quick walk outside, maybe to the outskirts of campus or to University Way. I would be listening to music and playing the augmented reality online game Pokemon Go, once again not multitasking with research/school stuff.

I then had a biweekly class that was about two hours long and stretched into the late afternoon, a course that was the most brain-intensive of my courseload. This was an Empirical Methods class, where each week we read multiple research papers and worked through some skill-building such as writing structured abstracts, identifying the kind of epistemological research being done, and have conversations on ethics involved, to name a few. It was usually by the end of this class that I would find myself experiencing the first signs of screen fatigue, which indicated that it was time for lunch. I intentionally took late lunches, because by the time I was done eating, I would have acquired a lot of energy to power through the evening.

The evening is when I would usually reserve time for doing research work, reading, or other homework assignments for class. I curated a different playlist with different genres for each of these tasks: rock/metal music during research, Bollywood dance music for reading, and Bengali music for homework. I also had at least three days a week of evening time where I would be video calling my friends from Minneapolis, either playing Among Us or plain hanging out. On other nights, I would take some more Pokemon Go walks, usually to grocery stores. I would put in a few more hours of work post-dinner, and be in bed by midnight.

Not really alone

When I moved to Seattle in August, knowing fully well that I’d be doing my classes online anyway, I came without knowing what to expect. I had a basic sense of long days of Zoom classes, several hours staring at a computer screen leading to headaches, and isolation. As arguably one of the most extroverted people I know, I considered that last point the most dangerous thing for me, because I have always thrived on being in social situations and making connections with people.

Fast forward four months or so, and my original expectations have largely been true. However, what I didn’t anticipate as much was forming incredible connections with my cohort members without so much as being within 5 miles of any of them. When I think about it, it occurred to me that the core components of forming connections that I had relied on for my entire life were still true over time — we were people with shared circumstances at a similar stage in our life that we would be sharing over the next few years. In the end, I had a better quarter than I had thought I would, and for that, I am grateful to the people around me.

While I’m on the topic of being grateful to people around me, I must talk about the professors and the rest of the HCDE Department outside of my cohort. All of my instructors adapted their course material for the online format seamlessly, and I never felt like I was either missing out on the learning experiences or the in-class community building. The class periods included informal check-ins with questions such as “where in the world would you rather be right now?”, questions that kicked off short, tangential conversations much like in an in-person setting. When it was time to conduct the business of the class, we were always given ample time to work in our breakout rooms, with periodical check-ins from the professors to see how we were doing and if we had any questions. Outside of the “classroom”, the professors and other graduate students in the department were always up for Slack chats and happy hours, creating a hallway conversation-like environment. I am incredibly thankful for their support in these tough times.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the roles played by my friends not affiliated with UW. On long workdays, those Among Us sessions or video call hangouts were always things to look forward to and gave me the energy needed to get through the rest of the day. Even outside of those more structured times, I would regularly get calls/texts from these people and we would have quick one-on-one conversations or shared work time.

To my reader, I will finish with this. If you came here with the question “how might starting grad school fully online look like?”, then I hope I gave you some form of an answer. If you came here looking for ways to understand and appreciate your support system, then I hope I have left you with a deeper appreciation of the people in your life who make your days that little bit brighter. If you were looking for something else, then I hope you found it, or I apologize for giving you the impression that you might have found something here that is not there. In all these cases, I leave you with the invitation to reach out to me, be it formally or informally, to talk about anything at all, and hope that you feel comfortable in doing so. Peace.