Charbonneau:
Can you mention what organization are you affiliated with? What was your
most recent degree and academic program you were part of?
Ganz:
Most recently I got a dual major in computational biology and
environmental science. It was a bachelors from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, which is in Troy, New York. This fall I am starting a masters
at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of
Washington.
Charbonneau:
In March 2020 when the world changed, walk me through how that changed
like your college experience.
Ganz:
Yes, it was a profound change. The academic experience of doing
everything remotely and on a 3-hour time difference was not great. I had
a couple of classes where I just wish I did not have to do them if I was
being honest and I did not learn anything.
The academic side of it, it was an adjustment. But my professors are due
a lot of credit for making it work and transitioning away from that
traditional lecture style college course to something that was
asynchronous or project based. There was a direct correlation in my
experience between professors who made that switch and the quality of
the content. I liked the courses where I could learn at my own pace or
do a project and then turn it in and get feedback from the professor.
Those courses were great and I learned a lot from them. I got wonderful
experience, whereas the ones that were like: “All right guys, we are
going to get on zoom at 7:00 AM and you are gonna listen to me for two
hours.” I hated those. That was a poor research experience. I had to
pivot a fair amount because I knew I wanted to go into science.
When I first started my bachelors, I was working in a chemistry lab on
origin of life research. We would mix clay together and see if that
would make RNA polymerase or something. You cannot really do that
remotely. I was extremely fortunate to be able to do a GIS (Geographic
Info Systems) internship in summer of 2020 that was fully remote.
Through that I learned about how data science and geospatial work
impacts the environmental sciences and that made me pivot to not
necessarily doing research, but doing things that build those skills. I
liked an online class about spatial data science. It was some ESRI thing
that they did like for free because the pandemic. That was cool.
Then just doing like some online like contests or meetups or what have
you just to get out of the classroom experience, as it relates to using
GIS for environmental research questions. My university had a remote
research position that I applied for and that would have been spring of
2021. I did not really do a ton of proper research there. It was more
like: “Here is the data set. Have fun, undergraduate make a bunch of
graphs.”
I did not really get back on track until fall of 2021, which was the
start of my senior year, and that is when I was like back on campus in
Troy, which is where RPI is located. I got back into collaborating with
a research group and was talking with a graduate student consistently
about a project. But this time it was not lab work. It was a lot more
computational. I felt that lost year or whatever was more so building
new skills that I could apply in a different research context. You must
be there for that.
Charbonneau:
Did you go back in the fall 2020?
Ganz:
So spring of 2020, the world ended and I distinctly remember RPI
extended spring break by a week and then they told us that we were going
fully remote. Then I remember the day that e-mail came out, my mom
called me and was like: “Hey, you need to get the hell out of there.” I
came back to Seattle and I was living with my family, and I did that for
18 months. It was through the spring 2020 semester, the following year.
Then I came back in 2021.
Charbonneau:
Then I am assuming when you start up your masters program at University
of Washington upcoming here, that is all in person back to business as
usual?
Ganz:
I do not know the exact policies that the UW is using. I am sure it is
all in person. I will be mad if it is not because like that is the point
of the graduate experience, but they have some precautions like
recommending that we wear masks in certain contexts. I am not aware of
anything like mandatory testing or quarantine periods or anything like
that, so it it is business as usual.
Charbonneau:
Elaborate more what you are focus is going to be with that masters
program you are starting.
Ganz:
I have an NSF fellowship for it. As part of that, I had to write a
proposal. I can tell you what my project will be. I am interested in
modeling wildfire dynamics from satellites. I am interested in whether
the hydraulic response in forests can tell us something about how that
forest is. So if we see on a thermal satellite a spot on on Earth is not
transpiring as much as we think it should be six months prior to fire
season. Does that observation tell us something about whether that
forest will burn or is more prone to burning the following summer? That
is the gist of it.
Charbonneau:
Can you elaborate more like what gravitated you towards that GIS,
because it sounds like that is where your focus is heading.
Ganz:
Yes. Well, there is two interests developed in parallel just based off
the opportunities that were available to me. I had always wanted to put
them together somehow, but you cannot really do GIS with astrobiology.
It is like we do not know where the stuff happened, and I think I had
just been maintaining those two things and was like, all right, I will
work on both and see where life takes me. I will figure it out later
because I am a first-year student in college, I do not what I want. Then
the pandemic happened and that kind of and put away one of those. So I
was like, well, I got the other one might as well, I might as well go
with this.
Charbonneau:
What specific skills were you looking to teach yourself? What technology
or platforms were you primarily using?
Ganz:
Yes. So as the main online class I did was a MOOC that Esri ran. This
was it the course was called spatial data science. I thought it was
interesting because it was a link between like the operations that
ArcGIS does and the statistical things that I would write in Python or
whatever. It was things like Miranda's eye and spatial autocorrelation
and hotspot analysis, like all those different things that are genuinely
uniquely positioned exactly between statistics and the GIS side of
things, so that was the main skill that I learned. It gave me enough
comfort with those concepts that I was able to like leave the Esri
ecosystem because I am not going to pay for a license. I felt more
comfortable to do those things either by hand, just in code or using a
more open source tool to do that same work.
Charbonneau:
What is your outlook on what what you plan to do with your research and
your work upon completing your masters? How has the pandemic shaped your
outlook of what you envision for your future?
Ganz:
I think the pandemic has more shifted the topics that I am interested in
as we have already been discussing, but I knew that I I really wanted to
do stuff with science. I think that regardless of the pandemic, when I
got into that age where I am starting to think: “All right, this is how
you become a scientist, you must go to graduate school. You must get an
advanced degree.” I think that pandemic or not, I would have learned
that was what I was expected to do to become a scientist and would have
gone down a similar path.
Charbonneau:
Do you think you will apply what you are learning to opportunities
outside the geoscience profession or will mostly stay in the geoscience
community?
Ganz:
That is one of the cool parts about science is that the stuff you do can
suddenly get picked up and thrown into a completely different
environment. But I think that I will stay in the geosciences. I think
something I found is I really like working in this space. I like
thinking about climate change. I like thinking about conservation and
think something profound would have to happen to me for me to move away
from that.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice that there was lan uptick in like the demand or need for
the type of research you were doing? What have you noticed in terms of
like the outlook for like the type of work you are looking at?
Ganz:
I am not sure I can speak much to the demand of my research just because
I was an undergraduate during the pandemic. I cannot say much about
research demands, but as far as just in in popular culture, people are
starting to realize that climate change is happening now. We are feeling
it now and we need to think a lot harder about what our relationship
with the environment is going to be. I think that this kind of work that
I am doing broadly is becoming more in demand because of that
consciousness.
Can I say like the number of citations and wildfire research has? No
like I cannot. I cannot say anything about those hard metrics that a
professor might be able to say.
Charbonneau:
What is your workload relative to your capacity?
Ganz:
That is one of the great strengths of GIS and remote sensing especially
is that we have this massive constellation of satellites in operation
right now. For people who are in this discipline, it is quite easy to
pull down imagery and start doing work with it. There has also been a
lot of privately produced services for working with satellite imagery at
scale.
Earth engine is a tool that Google makes that I use all the time because
I do not want to download a petabyte of Landsat images on my laptop. I
need to do that work on another machine, so I think those tools that the
remote sensing community has produced make it easy for us to meet the
demands for our work, and there is enough for me to do in this space.
Charbonneau:
Just from what I am gleaning off what you are saying so far, because
most of the work you are doing is so computational based, you do not see
any foreseeable long term COVID impacts that are going to directly
affect your work because you are able to do the work remotely.
Ganz:
Yeah, I think COVID will affect it, but in the way it is affecting
society at large, I do not think it is going to make it harder for us to
do the science.
Charbonneau:
What platforms were they using to teach you? What interface are you
using for that?
Ganz:
Yeah, RPI used Blackboard for everything. That is the product they used.
Some professors did everything over e-mail because they could not figure
out how to use Blackboard. I found that very funny. Personally, I wish
they would have used something like GitHub or a tool that is more used
in industry, but they did not. It was Blackboard and e-mail. That was
it.
Charbonneau:
When you were completing your program and it was disrupted did they
waive any requirements for you? Did they make any specific
accommodations or did they not change anything?
Ganz:
So I qualified for Pell Grants and that was the the cutoff that a lot of
colleges used to determine your relative need in the future to pay for
school or ectera. I want to say I got some form of emergency grant from
the federal government as a part of the Cares Act or some prior piece of
legislation. That was the main accommodation, in the socioeconomic
sphere.
I was extremely privileged as I have described. I had a wonderful
support network for my family and I was not housing insecure. I was not
food insecure or anything along those lines.
Charbonneau:
Did they switch any courses to like pass fail? What do they do for your
lab requirements? Did they make all your labs virtual?
Ganz:
As far as like the pass fail sort of thing, our RPI policy beforehand
was you can pass fail anything that is not a part of your major. If you
want to pass fail something as part of a minor like they only let you
take two courses on that. So there there was some detail about that.
They waived all of that and said you could pass fail anything like no
questions asked as many as the of the courses you wanted. The downside
was that they tried to warn us against just doing everything past fail
because they said like: “You know, whatever employer, or graduate
school, or medical school you are going to after graduation, they are
going to look at that and they might raise an eyebrow.” The option was
there, but I would say it was discouraged from us. That lasted from
spring 2020 all the way through spring 2021. They did it for three
semesters I think. I do not entirely remember on that.
Then as far as the field and lab component, the school believed we
should have those components pretty much at all costs. Their perspective
was if you are remote, we hope you will return a future semester so you
can do these things in person. The advice I got was to delay all your
lab courses as long as you can and just load up on like lecture stuff
during the pandemic and that is what I did. I was taking an organic
chemistry class the semester COVID hit and so that was just like we are
going to film the experiment right down the observations, which was
unfortunate because I really loved that work. It was one of my favorite
classes.
But I delayed even my first-year geology classes. I just like kept
delaying some classes because I knew there was a field component and I
wanted to be present for it and that is what I end up doing. The fall
semester I came back in person was doing lab 20 hours a week. It was
fun. I really enjoyed those kinds of courses, but it was a lot.
I am glad that they did that because those were some of my favorite
experiences of college where I learned a lot in those courses. I think
it would have been a lot less valuable had I not had the in person
component.
I was lucky that I had enough time left to do that pivoting. I had
classmates who did not have that option, or people who wanted to
graduate early. Were they just had to shrug and say: “Well, you know, I
am not going to get that part of the experience.”
Charbonneau:
Were there any specific skill gaps you felt like you absorbed or that
came about because of the pandemic? Do you do you feel like there was
any kind of skill set that you felt like you did not get to develop as
much because of COVID?
Ganz:
Yeah, I would say the science communication part I was fine on. But I
would say that was mostly because of like practice I got to have post
pandemic in that year I came back. During the pandemic, absolutely. I
missed some of that. That was a gap filled later.
The one thing I would say I missed was being a scientist in the field.
There is certain behaviors that go along with that of just having the
eye to observe things that a person might miss or to like be able to see
an outcrop and say: “That is an ancient riverbed,” or something like
that.
I got a little bit of that practice that semester where I was just doing
lab all the time, but it was so much and so fast. Even now when I go out
hiking or something, I think to myself: “You know I am a person who
should be good at like identifying species. I should be able to like
look at things and have some explanation of the natural world around
me,” and I just do not. That is one skill that I wish I were able to
practice more during my undergraduate.
Charbonneau:
Are you going to get to do any of those skills in your future program or
will that not be the emphasis?
Ganz:
No, I will. University of Washington emphasizes field work as part of
it. I have two classes this quarter that we are going to have field trip
components, so that will be fun. Hopefully, they do not beat up on me
too much for not knowing how to identify trees, but I am glad I will be
able to practice that a little bit more as part of my current program.
Charbonneau:
What skills do you really want to develop in your program that are going
to be the most beneficial to the work you plan to do?
Ganz:
I think the core thing that is incredibly in demand is the computational
side. I cannot tell you how many CV's I have seen on lab websites that
are like bachelors, masters, PhD, postdoc, like all research oriented
stuff and then they go become a data scientist at Zillow or something
like that. Those skills are just so cross cutting and so useful.
On the research side I cannot tell you how many papers I have seen that
used machine learning to problem and look it how it worked. I am glad I
spent all that time self-teaching myself a lot of that stuff because it
is the most important thing in this field right now.
Charbonneau:
What were the opportunities that were given to you because of the
pandemic that you would not otherwise have looked at?
Ganz:
I think a big part of it was a participation in the open source
community GIS and remote sensing in general because it is so dependent
on software. It has really benefited profoundly from people just writing
code for the good of other people to use. That is one of the things that
really made me quite passionate about this field is being able to
contribute to that.
During the pandemic I could write code and contribute it to an
R-package, which I thought was cool. I got to use tools that lsomeone
across the world had written three years ago for some purpose, and I
thought: “Oh wow, this is perfect,” and I got to benefit.
I do not see a future that does not include remote work in some
capacity. This comes back to my privilege of being able to live with my
family and have reduced stress financially. I was so much healthier and
happier when I was working from home, whether in an internship or during
the academic year that it has impacted profoundly how I want to plan out
my life.
Charbonneau:
Do you feel like there has been an increase or a surge of people going
to this field, or do you feel like it is not chaning? Do you think in
general this more computational side is getting more people because
other people shipped it to that as well?
Ganz:
When I was in undergraduate, I was the only person I knew who was full
bore into this field. But I think part of that was just the environment
I was in RPI was very much an engineering school. Most of my peers were
computer science majors. Just the fact that I was doing stuff in the
environment was unique on its own. But even within that small cohort at
RPI, I had a unique set of interests.
I think that now that I am going to a university that is much more
focused on the environment, like UW has an entire college that is
dedicated two just environmental studies, I think that I will meet a lot
more people who are who may have made that switch in an analogous manner
to what I did.
I also see in social media about this field, like LinkedIn groups or
what have you, that there is a lot more online coursework for people who
want to get into this kind of work. I think the popularity is increasing
but I did not really see that at my university, I more saw that just
like really on the Internet.
Charbonneau:
What is something you can take away from the pandemic or something you
learned that you can use as a strategy moving forward? What advice would
you give to your past self in hindsight?
Ganz:
I do not want to say mental health, but I want to say mental toughness.
Having the ability to focus on something, be self-directed, all those
things which I had at some degree back then. But God, I got a lot better
at all those things as I matured through the pandemic.
That is the main skill that I have right now that will be to my
advantage in graduate school is that I can sit down and read 15 papers
if I want to learn more about a subject. Just having the perseverance to
go through that arose mostly because of the pandemic.
I would tell my past self that: “You are about to go through a whole
bunch of time where you where you are by yourself. Think hard about how
you want to use that time, because if you use it effectively, you will
be happy with the result.”
Charbonneau:
Is there anything else you want to add or you ok with ending it there?
Ganz:
I am good to end it here. This was a lot of fun. It was a pleasant
experience thinking back on that on that period. I am glad to get to
contribute to this.
