Michalak:
I am an associate professor of geology at Cal Poly Humboldt or
California Polytechnic Institute at Humboldt, which is one of the
California State University campuses.
Charbonneau:
How long have you been at that position?
Michalak:
I have been there for 9 years, and in my current position, two years as
an associate professor.
Charbonneau:
What modes of teaching are you currently using at your facility? Are you
doing blended learning or is everything back to in person? Do you have
some remote classes?
Michalak:
In the summer we do not offer any classes, which is not unusual for us.
We have in the past offered one or two GE courses, depending on demand.
There has not been sufficient demand for this summer, so no courses this
summer. In the fall, we are completely face-to-face, except for three
courses, two of which are remote or online synchronous, and one of which
is online asynchronous.
The asynchronous online course existed prior to the pandemic. The two
synchronous online courses have been added because of student demand.
Charbonneau:
What platform are you using to conduct the online courses?
Michalak:
We have a Zoom account with our university and that is the best way.
Courses are held over Zoom, coupled with our learning platform called
Canvas. You can integrate your course a lot in Canvas. For example, I
know some instructors post YouTube videos through Canvas. The course
material is delivered through Zoom and then asynchronously through
Canvas assignments, readings, and other integrated links or postings.
Charbonneau:
For your laboratory sections and your field work components, are you
still conducting those outdoor hands-on business as usual? Or are those
offered online as well?
Michalak:
None of our laboratory or field work classes are offered online anymore.
In the fall, the only courses online are two lower division GE and Upper
Division GE with no field or laboratory component. All our laboratory
and field courses are business as usual starting Fall 2022. We have
planned for the same number of hours and the same location and the same
activities as they were pre-pandemic. As my colleagues know, of course,
things can go awry, but that is our current plan.
Charbonneau:
What COVID-related restrictions are you going to have in the fall when
students return?
Michalak:
I am not 100% clear. I think that there will be a big announcement in
the weeks preceding the semester about exactly what is happening. We had
a mandatory mask policy until the middle of the spring semester in 2022,
then masks became optional for everybody except in certain situations,
like the health center. I believe that a faculty member who runs a
laboratory can set their own policy.
However, faculty members cannot require students to wear masks in their
classrooms. We must respect everyone's choices and attitude toward the
mask wearing in the spring, which will continue in the fall. Last
semester our university instituted a vaccine mandate as well. Students
had to get vaccinated for COVID-19, or file for an exemption and from my
understanding nobody was denied an exemption. But if they chose to be
exempt, they had to do weekly COVID testing. That is going to go away
for the fall. It was required for staff, faculty, and students.
For the fall, my understanding is, is that anyone who is vaccinated or
unvaccinated, it does not matter if they test positive for COVID. I do
not know if they are required to report it. I hope they do, to our
health officer. Then I think that they must test negative or wait for
some number of days to return to the classroom. But if those details are
public, I do not know of them yet.
Charbonneau:
How long did you completely close your campus doors and go completely
virtual? How long did that go on for before you started bringing
students and faculty back into the offices?
Michalak:
The remaining Spring 2020 semester was all remote, our campus was
closed. At some point they even locked doors, to prevent people from
entering the buildings. I think this was during the couple of weeks when
the country was really trying to lock down. There were some exceptions,
there were some essential workers who took care of wildlife specimens
for example. Or if you had a laboratory experiment that was going to
explode and send noxious fumes, those folks could enter to take care of
safety hazards. Our department completely shut down. We did not do any
field trips. We did not hold a face-to-face field camp in summer 2020
and then in the following semester, fall 2020, we offered two to three
optional weekend field trips for some major courses. Other than that, it
was all online labs and field methods courses.
Charbonneau:
What level of virtual integration have you incorporated into your
instruction and teaching from the pandemic that you still use now?
Michalak:
That is a subject of ongoing conversation between myself and my
colleagues, and how best to move forward. For the 2021-2022 academic
year we were focused on retaining the students we had. What that could
look like is a student living out of the area and only coming to the
area for one weekend field trip. We would accommodate a hybrid type
learning environment for certain students, especially if they only had a
semester or a year left. We didn’t want attending field trips to be a
barrier to them graduating.
We made those accommodations because we were focused on seeing the
students heavily affected by the pandemic and getting them to that
finish line, graduation. Now moving forward, those affected early on
have graduated. Now we have a chance to start in the fall again with a
new group of students, and it will not be a hybrid experience. We are
going to hold our majors classes mostly face to face. We are not going
to continue with hybrid experiences because it is a lot of extra work
for the instructor. It creates a different learning environment, and it
changes the learning objectives.
In summary, we did whatever it took to deliver content to our students
over the past two years and that looked different for different
students. Moving forward, we are clear about which classes are
face-to-face and there is not an online option for most geology major
courses.
Charbonneau:
What strategies has your department used to recruit and retain students?
Michalak:
Our priority of the last two years has been retaining, not so much
recruiting because it was difficult for us to recruit living in a very
remote, isolated part of the state of California. We live far north, six
hours north of San Francisco, Sacramento. We are not a commuter campus.
What we offer is an integrated place-based experience here that is
difficult to learn from when you live outside of the area and are
learning in your home or bedroom. Moving forward and recruiting
students, we must have students move here so they are integrated in the
community and environment. We also live in a geologically dynamic place.
We can see spectacular examples of geology in a 30-minute drive or even
a 10-minute drive. That is our strength and our selling point as we move
forward to recruiting students to our department.
But as far as retaining students in the past we had a couple of couple
of strategies. First, we were as flexible as we could in our offerings
of courses. There is an ideal flow to the courses you take in a geology
degree, and we would make exceptions for students. For example, if they
wanted to be remote in fall 2020, but then on campus in spring
2020-2021, we would recommend they take certain courses out of order.
This strategy resulted in some knowledge gaps here and there and was not
ideal, but it was OK.
We have a requirement of a set of courses that we call specialization
courses or electives, and we were very flexible in accepting
substitutions. If a student already had courses that were not
traditionally considered specialization and it was an online course, we
would make that substitution for them because we felt that they met the
requirements of the degree and that was a reasonable accommodation to
make.
We also made sure our students had access to other types of support. We
submitted a lot of what our university calls “care reports,” if a
student stopped showing up. We tracked all our majors attendance and
passing rates, and in this way, we were caring for their mental health
using a mechanism available to us. We could refer students to the
counseling office and other types of support for students. That was a
big part of our strategy for retaining students.
We spent a lot of time every week as a faculty body discussing these
strategies. We would have a department faculty meeting once a week, and
we would start every meeting with: “Do we have any students of concern,
students that are dropping behind or not showing up?” Then we would
strategize to reach out to them, check on them, and see how they are
doing.
Charbonneau:
What is the current size of your faculty in your department?
Michalak:
We have 6 full time teaching faculty members.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice the size of your faculty or department change because of
the pandemic or did those six people stay throughout?
Michalak:
We did not change our net size. We lost one person, and gained one
person, and then one person is retiring. After next year, we will have a
net loss of 1. But that is a retirement that would have happened anyway.
The size of our faculty or staff did not change during the pandemic.
Charbonneau:
I am assuming since you mentioned people are coming back in person, you
are all allowed to travel and do fieldwork.
Michalak:
Yes, this summer I would say is back to the level it was in 2019 in
terms of conferences, workshops, and field work for all of us.
Charbonneau:
The summers before, did you have to get permission or follow certain
protocols to be able to do your research and field work?
Michalak:
In summer 2020, no fieldwork was allowed. No spending of any grant
money, so it was all frozen. Then in 2021, you had to write a safety
proposal that the President's office reviewed. Then now in 2022, there
are no restrictions.
Charbonneau:
In terms of your departmental budget, did that change across the
pandemic time span?
Michalak:
Yes, it did. I do not have the exact numbers of increase or decrease but
it was significant. Our expenditures went down by 50-60% during the 2021
academic year because our primary expenses, laboratory consumables,
field trips, and just office supplies, including the copier machine,
were 0.
The college has a budget and then each department has a budget, and you
know things can be moved around within those budgets. A budget is more
of a guideline for how we should spend. For example, we do not know how
many students are going to be attending our field trips, thus the total
cost, until after the budget has already been made.
Right now, our budget is up relative to that low year (academic year
20-21). However, whether our expenditures will exceed the budget is an
open question. I will say that we had “CARES” money, federal assistance
to public universities that helped a lot and that would that help us buy
iPads and cameras to improve teaching. That was helpful and a different
budget from our college budget.
Donors were a little more generous during the pandemic, so that money
funded scholarships for students to attend field camp or buy gear they
needed or travel for field work. Even though our state budget has
shrunk, which reflects our majors going down too, and our general
enrollment gradually going down in the last five or six years. It feels
like our needs are met because of the generous donors and the CARES
money. If that support will that continue though, is an open question.
Charbonneau:
How did you deal with all those students missing field camp?
Michalak:
We wanted to offer a substitution, so we did. We offered a virtual field
camp. Three of our about 20 students opted to hold back and wait a year.
We gave them that option at no extra cost to them. For the students who
needed to graduate in 2020 we offered a virtual field camp where we were
able to teach them some applicable skills like GIS (Geographic
Information Systems), writing, map reading, and other types of spatial
reasoning skills that they could do on the computer.
Many students who graduated in 2020 and are now employed say that there
was a lot of use in that course. I will say it was disappointing for all
of us to have this field camp that we were planning to go to vanish.
Other geology departments in other universities pushed their camp back
to the fall semester, hoping for better luck then. Then some other
universities just said we are not going to offer one, you can try to
find one at another school. We decided to offer a virtual camp and I
taught part of that myself.
Charbonneau:
Did you notice any pandemic-related skill gaps in your students?
Michalak:
Yes. I am going to answer this question including anecdotes I have heard
from my colleagues, because I, as a department chair, was not in the
classroom as much as some of them. But they would all say the skill gap
seemed to be the biggest in the past academic year, 2021 to 2022.
The thing I noticed the most was time management and communication. For
example, being proactive in one’s ability to understand where to start
on an assignment and complete the assignment in the allotted time given.
Those were the things the students struggled with the most, and in part,
we were flexible with deadlines. This varies depending on the
instructor, but most instructors were not making assignments due within
a week like we used to be before the pandemic. The attitude was more, “I
will work with you on a soft deadline.”
We met them where they were, and it was a fine line coaxing them along
and not leaving anybody behind. Then, as far as the geology skills, I
think one thing that is helpful when students are in a department taking
classes face-to-face is that they start to see linkages between their
classes.
For example, a student working on homework from another class, or they
are in the lab, and they realize “I have seen this in this class,” they
are making linkages. They are running into each other in the hallway. It
feels like a more cohesive educational experience. What we found when
courses are online was that they feel isolated, and students could not
as easily connect to that bigger spider web of complex thinking.
Especially high-level geologic processes and 3D spatial reasoning. It
was harder for them to link that without having it in their face all the
time on campus.
That was a skill gap that we noticed. When we were 100% online,
obviously their map reading, and their rock identification skills were
not as good. But as soon as we got in the classroom, some of them were
so excited, they pushed themselves harder than I have seen many
students. The first order skills like rock identification were easy to
get back. But skills like time management, communication, and complex
network of advanced understanding, that takes years to improve upon. We
are hoping to focus on that in the future.
Charbonneau:
Did you embed anything in your curriculum to help facilitate some of the
students getting back to the norm?
Michalak:
As colleagues, we tried to get as aligned as possible. For department
meetings we used to meet every two weeks, but during pandemic time, we
would meet every week. We would start off every meeting discussing
students of concern that needed extra support. We would ask each other
for advice about our course assignments, such as “Should I scale it
back? Should I streamline it? Should I integrate it in some other way?”
We were not making curricular-level changes, but we were making
syllabi-level changes to meet the needs of our students.
We tried to align with each other so we would have a general flow. If
one class had a big exam or a big project, we would tweak the deadline
so that the students were not so overloaded. This attention to detail
was something we had never worried about. It was a learning experience
to think about this in a broader, connected way. We were trying to give
them the best possible experience that they could have.
We discussed offering workshops on time management and writing to
students. But that kind of offering would have to be on Zoom, and the
students were so burned out on Zoom we decided not to. We found that
what they wanted was just someone to listen to them. We offered that as
much as we could, in zoom office hours, or during class. We also spent a
lot of time inviting students to consider job or internship
opportunities that were available. We would identify a group of students
that were qualified and write them an e-mail and say: “You should
consider this,” and we would help them with their letters of intent. We
focused on that kind of hands-on mentoring to develop them to be more
“work ready.”
Charbonneau:
What jobs do your students usually tend to take once they complete their
time with you?
Michalak:
Most of them go into environmental consulting, the public or private
sector, and many of them pursue licensure in geology or geoscience,
whether it is professional geology or engineering geology. Then smaller
numbers go into mineral resources, or oil and gas, and then maybe 10-15%
go on to a masters or PhD and end up as researchers. Then we have
another subset go into water science or hydrology.
Charbonneau:
What is the emphasis of geoscience professional skills you and your
colleagues really try to incorporate your curriculum? What are the
topics, or the skills sets you really focus on to prepare them for that
professional life afterwards?
Michalak:
There are several things. First, written communication and authoring
reports, understanding the difference between a literature review and a
technical report. We practice doing technical reports in some courses.
We have an alumni Advisory Board that are all professional
geoscientists, so they help us design assignments that are more
applicable to the real world rather than a research paper. Another major
skillset are field method skills. How do you take notes? How do you
approach a rock outcrop? How do you approach mapping? According to some
of the AGI (American Geosciences Institute) reports these skills are
those that employers are looking for. We read those reports and we do
our best to incorporate those skills in our courses.
Charbonneau:
Do you still have any pandemic-related accommodations in play?
Michalak:
We have not changed our standards or curriculum at all. Any changes are
mostly because of retirements or someone coming and leaving. Faculty
expertise is the is the main driver for many of our course offerings,
not pandemic related.
Charbonneau:
Something I wanted to also touch back on that you mentioned earlier is
you said that you have been with this organization for nine years and
you said two years ago is when your role changed to what you have now.
What was your role prior to what you have now from two years ago?
Michalak:
I was an assistant professor. I submitted my promotion and tenure
package in fall 2019, right before the pandemic. I also became
department chair at that time.
Charbonneau:
Were there any new opportunities for you due to the pandemic?
Michalak:
What has changed for me is the ease at which researchers talk over Zoom
now, as opposed to only people in their departments or their
institutions. I have colleagues at other institutions, and we used to
catch up on e-mail and see each other once a year at a conference or in
the field. When we were on a collaborative project together, a grant, we
would do our parts separately. Since the pandemic, we realized that we
all have more flexible time when no one was traveling.
Therefore, my colleagues and I decided to meet monthly over Zoom and
just keep each other honest on what aspects of research we are working
on. That was nice because I got to know people better than I otherwise
would have. I have kept some of those relationships going by meeting
occasionally on Zoom and working on projects together. I feel like I
have gained a few more colleagues at other institutions that I would not
have otherwise gained because of the ease of meeting on Zoom.
Charbonneau:
You mentioned you were doing your research. Was any of that impacted by
COVID? Did you have to suspend it for a little bit when you could not
travel?
Michalak:
Yes, about six months. I think I would say I lost about six months of
lab work. We sent mineral samples to other major laboratories to run
isotopic and geochemical data on the samples and those were delayed
about six months. What happened for me was that I had three master
students and all three of them delayed for one semester because they did
not have their data, but they all finished.
Then because of that, I was awarded a semester sabbatical, which I
delayed a semester too because I was so busy working with my students
helping them finish, that my sabbatical would have been impacted. I
asked to push that back and my university agreed to do that, which was a
huge relief for me.
Another thing I would say is that granting agencies have been flexible
with no cost extensions and rolling over some work, and that has been
nice to have that little safety net in there. My students were able to
finish even though they were delayed a semester. The university was not
after them saying: “If you do not graduate by this semester, you are
out.” There was always a way to keep things going, which was helpful.
Charbonneau:
What work did you pivot to and focus on when restrictions became a
hurdle for you?
Michalak:
Well, those monthly Zoom meetings with colleagues across the US, that
was the main thing I did. But to be honest, my time was mostly consumed
by offering all that extra support for students. The emotional support
in office hours, the reaching out to students who were not showing up,
brainstorming with my colleagues about how to retain the students that
we had. We put a lot of mental and emotional labor into retaining our
students, which took away from my research program. It is what it is.
That is what happened.
Charbonneau:
Do you feel like those strategies you implemented were effective?
Michalak:
Yes. We only had a few students who did not graduate. I do not know the
exact numbers, but it feels anecdotally to me was not more than the
usual 1 to 5% of students that that do not graduate, at least from our
institution from our program. Many of them may transfer to another
institution or not complete an undergraduate degree. Hopefully if
someone starts a geology degree they end up with a degree even if it is
in another field. To me, that is a success of higher education, whether
it is a degree from us or somewhere else. I did not keep direct tabs on
those students. I cannot answer definitively, but it feels like it was
worth it.
Charbonneau:
What is your strategy now that you have seen the effectiveness of those
efforts, as things return to what they were pre-pandemic?
Michalak:
I cannot answer for my colleagues, but I think they would agree in
saying that we cannot sustain that level of extra support from the six
of us faculty. Many of us went beyond and worked more hours than normal
offering support to students, not just office hours and support, but we
would create a lab for the students in person and then we created
slightly different lab exercises for the remote students and physically
mail them samples.
There was a lot of accommodation. We are no longer offering that. That
is fair because students know what to expect because it is clear what
the modality of the classes are. I feel like we are in a good place to
stop that hybrid type approach.
We are offering some courses online, which some students love, and there
is flexibility there that we have not had in the past. While we will not
be able to offer that level of support in the future, but I think that
we took away a few important things from our experience. One, we enjoy
meeting as a department every week. We will keep meeting every week
instead of every other week for a department meeting. We will continue
to discuss students of concern so we can support the students that are
falling off and need the most help. We will also continue to integrate
our syllabi so that we are hitting all the major competencies in a more
strategic way.
Charbonneau:
Do you feel like the pandemic opened or closed more doors for you?
Michalak:
I am going to say open. However, I am in an optimistic place right now.
I would also say another thing that I personally took away from this
experience is working from home. I used to pretend I could work from
home. I could not. I did not know how to do it. Now I have it down. I
have my desk, my headphones. The system is down, and I am a mobile
working machine. I can work anywhere, anytime.
That was great. Another thing that my colleagues and I have done is we
have started these work sessions where we will meet on Zoom and we will
just check in and say, what are you going to work on today, we will
share, and then we will go offline. We will do a dedicated work chunk
and then we will come back and share our success or failures, or
whatever we want to share. We could be working on completely different
things, or it could be working on an integrated project together.
Pre-pandemic, I would have never done anything like that. I guess what
it would have looked like before is that you would go to the library
with somebody and say: “Let us just work here in the library for a few
hours and then get some lunch.” It is just nice to be able to work in
your own home and compile your own schedules together. You could be on
the East Coast, and I could be here, and we could work simultaneously in
that way. Dedicated work sessions via Zoom are something that I have
learned how to do.
Charbonneau:
What is something you would tell yourself, a piece of advice, for how
you would handle some of the things you are about to encounter if you
could talk to yourself prior to the pandemic?
Michalak:
Collectively, my faculty colleagues and I, put a lot of pressure on us
to keep the students happy. We were affected by the outcome of their
success. I think that I would go back and say to myself: “Listen, you
are not a surgeon. No one is going to die on the operating table if you
do not check your e-mail tonight.” Learn how to separate work from home
even when you are working from home. Have a clear philosophy on how you
are going to spend your day and your time and try not to get into these
doom circles.
When everything is going poorly, and the hardest part of the pandemic is
getting better. Oh no, it is getting worse. Oh no, it is getting even
worse. That rollercoaster. It wears on your well-being. You must
separate work and personal life to kind of ride that wave, I think.
Charbonneau:
What is your biggest takeaway for how you handle obstacles coming to you
now that you have had this experience?
Michalak:
I think one thing we all learned was that we could not do everything. We
had to focus on what was the most important. Sometimes when we made
decisions, things that were somewhat important were not addressed.
Letting that kind of fall away is OK. For example, it was a bummer that
my MS students had to delay their graduation for a semester. That was
hard on them, and me. I do not know what to say other than sometimes
nonideal situations just happen.
You just tell yourself that this is hard, but if this passes, we will
get to the other side and then we will look back and it will not be that
big of a deal. I will approach any new challenge that seems daunting by
telling myself that I will either get through it or I will not. But
nonetheless, I will look back and it will not be so important. That
would be the way I would approach things in the future.
For example, soon I would be submitting my promotion file to apply for
full professor. I will have to delay that by year and is that a big
deal? No, not really. I feel like pre-pandemic me would have been
annoyed that my schedule was pushed back. That is going to happen and
that is OK. It is not ideal, but it is OK.
What helped our program get through the pandemic, and why we are we are
feeling good about the future, is that we have an excellent group of
colleagues. We have students who really want to learn geology, so our
mission has never changed. We just had to change a little bit of our
process. Who we are as a department survived through this whole thing
and has not changed. Our mission has not changed. I feel good about
that. I think moving forward, other geoscience programs that have a
strong mission and a strong core faculty will be fine.
