Melanie Michalak
Associate Professor
Department of Geology, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt

Interviewed by:  Luc Charbonneau, American Geosciences Institute
Interview date:  July 25, 2022
Location:  Microsoft Teams

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In footnotes or endnotes please cite AGI interviews like this:

Interview of Melanie Michalak by Luc Charbonneau on July 25, 2022, American Geosciences Institute, Alexandria, Virginia USA, https://covid19.americangeosciences.org/data/oral-histories/melanie_michalak/

Transcript

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.