Chen:
I am currently at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and I am an
NSF Earth research postdoctoral fellow. I am effectively a researcher
and a postdoctoral scholar.
Charbonneau:
From what you told us you started that in 2020 correct?
Chen:
The title of that position was different in 2020. I started January
2020, but I have effectively been a postdoctoral scholar with the same
advisor for this whole period.
Charbonneau:
Can you walk me through a timeline of how the pandemic has impacted your
work?
Chen:
In March 2020 I had been a couple of months in. In some ways I was still
doing some on boarding. We started some preliminary experimental work,
but we were still settling on what project to do. I was getting trained
and everything when the pandemic hit it.
I am not going to say it came out of nowhere because it did not come out
of nowhere, but the transition from “should I be worried about this” to
“you cannot go to the lab” happened very rapidly. In my case it was a
benefit to have been in such an early stage because I talked with my
advisor, and we decided to rapidly pivot to doing numerical simulation
work in a similar space.
I do reactive transport in porous media at the pore scale. I was going
to do experimental work in that space, but we decided to just pivot to
doing numerical simulations with the hope that we would then pair that
with experimental work. Before things reopened, what happened is for
year and a half of the pandemic where I did not really have access to
the lab and whatnot I worked from home. I was doing the simulation work
and I am very thankful that my advisor did numerical simulation.
He was able to help me with that. I did not intentionally choose him
because I wanted to do numerical simulation, but with his help that
meant I could be very flexible. He had access to the tools and let me go
(to work) very quickly. As the pandemic started to progress or regress,
our department outlined plans for people to get into labs and work. A
lot of that had to be very solo. I had to wait because I was doing some
of the experimental work that required the use of other facilities.
There was this coordination issue where I would need to make sure I
could be in one facility to do the things I needed to do and then be
able to go to the other one. Coordinating between the different
facilities in this case, the Minnesota Nano Center and our main lab
space was a little bit difficult to navigate. There was an added burden
of any time I wanted to do lab work I could only go to the lab, and I
had to commute. I could not go in, stay in my office, do whatever, eat
lunch. I could not do any of that. I had to go in, do my lab work, come
back, and that made the barrier to doing the lab work a lot higher, and
so it was not until things were back in the office, and we were back
full time where I would say got my footing better settled for doing the
experimental in the lab work.
We are in this kind of, as you describe, this endemic phase. I am back
in the office full time. I do lab work. We are finishing the paper
related to that lab work in the simulations, and I am doing mostly other
lab work. I will say the pandemic did not change my focus entirely. I
still wanted to come back to doing the experiments, but it was useful
having this thing that I can work on if I am stuck without access to
like lab facilities.
I would say that the university worked hard to get us access to the labs
early, so I had access to the building as early as I would like in May
or June of 2020. Again, under very restricted conditions. I could not
access my office. I could only access the specific lab that I said I
would be in had to coordinate my hours so I could not overlap with other
people. Some of the experiments we do take a long time. If my experiment
does not take exceptionally long, it may be that someone else takes a
couple of days or something and so coordinating that is always
difficult.
Charbonneau:
When you made that shift and started working on your numerical
simulations what platforms were you using?
Chen:
The specific tool I was using is COMSOL Multiphysics. A finite element
Multiphysics simulator. I have a couple of sets of computational
resources. I was running the simulator. I was running like barebone
simulations and setting them up on a Linux workstation that we could
remote into.
When that went down that provided issues. Because of the pandemic, you
had to be able to get in to be able to restart the machine.
I also had access to the Supercomputing Institute at the university
again because my advisor does research in computation using the
computational methods we already had that set up. I was able to run the
higher-grade high-resolution simulations on MSI. It is called MSI on the
MSI cluster, which was helpful, and I still do that. I am still running
simulations on the cluster. I do not know what I would do if I did not
have access to it. I guess I would just be running the lower risk things
and be having to take a lot of the results with some trepidation.
Charbonneau:
Have these research adjustments you made due to the pandemic guided the
research and what tools you use now?
Chen:
It is one of those things where I think the tool can be helpful. It is
like knowing that option is available, but it is something that I must
be careful in how I think about it because what I found during the
pandemic when I was getting started is that it was extremely easy to do
it.
I want to run a lot of things. You can build out this nice big matrix of
like I am going to run this simulation, with these like 10 different
parameters, and those have 10 different variations, so I must run 100
simulations. Is that like too many? It made me grapple with how to make
the most use of that time. That was the most helpful lesson that I
pulled out of this forced pandemic experience.
I think the other thing that will come up if you did not ask it now, but
I am going to bring it up now is how quickly the switch needed to happen
meant that I had to take the tool that was most like ready to start
producing results. COMSOL is particularly good at that, but it is a
finite element simulator. It has major drawbacks, especially for
simulating fluid flow and reaction chemistry, where mass conservation is
important. Finite element simulators do not do that as well natively
compared to say, finite volume simulators, but because COMSOL is
pre-built, and you can just set it up and click “go,” we ended up using
that tool instead.
The main research tool that some of the other people in my group use is
called OpenFOAM. I did not feel like I did not have the time to learn
it. I was starting to learn it, but because of the barrier to learning
that tool because it is a little less easy to use, I chose to do COMSOL
so I could get results quickly instead of the tool that would serve me
better in the long term.
Charbonneau:
How did you shift your communication with the people you were working
with during the pandemic?
Chen:
A lot of my work, especially because I had just started a lot of my
work, is very solo. It was me working on my project and just advised by
my advisor. We just moved from in-person meetings to doing meetings on
Zoom. The university provides Zoom in terms of seeing what other people
were doing. We have group meetings, and we hold those by Zoom as well.
I forgot because my advisor has been changing the frequency and type of
meetings we have been having, but it is once every couple of weeks that
we have these bigger meetings. The group members talking about their
research are not necessarily like a targeted, project-oriented meeting.
I would have individual meetings on my projects with my advisor every
other week. Then also every other week I have these larger group
meetings. Now we just do it in person now that we are in this more
endemic phase.
Charbonneau:
Did they extend the time for you to complete your research? Did they
give you more funding?
Chen:
The timing is a bit curious and lucky in some ways. I applied to the
fellowship in 2019 in the September 2019 cycle. They had initially
turned me down, so usually you would hear back by like March or so. In
that first round of funding, they said you did not get it.
In summer of 2020, the program director called me up and said: “Hey, we
have a little extra money. Your application was highly rated. You are
the next person in line to get funding. Do you want this fellowship and
when you want to start?” We found out in 2020. I talked with my advisor
about it and said: “Why don't I start in March (2021)?.”
The fellowship is 2 years and NSF did not give me any extensions, like
any extra funding or anything like that. They gave me the funding and I
was able to choose a timing that made sense because by March 2021 we had
been in a year. I had a little more access to the lab at that point. We
were able to time when I started the fellowship nicely so that I could
do the work I had initially set out to do.
Charbonneau:
Do you think there is anything in your research that has been
permanently altered by the pandemic?
Chen:
I do not think the pandemic has changed the tools I would say the field
uses. It changed some of the tools I use and have experience with, but I
would say it is in a broad sense. Paleontologists using 3D printing and
whatnot. I would not say the pandemic has had that impact in my field
because there is already microscale fluid dynamics and reaction
chemistry work.
It was already common to use these kinds of microfluidic tools that I
have been using. It was already common to use numerical simulation and
so I would just say I just got to step in the tradition a little bit
more than maybe than I had been before. In that sense, the pandemic did
not have a strong impact on the techniques and methods I used.
Charbonneau:
How did your productivity level change because of the pandemic?
Chen:
Oh, it is murder on my productivity. I know some people who really like
working at home. My wife does some work at home, and she is not
geoscience, but she likes being able to roll out of bed. I really like
having the separation of spaces and I had to work extremely hard to try
and have separation of my space. This is the place where I work. This is
the place where I like to do not work.
I am a bit of a gamer. My computer is a gaming machine which is helpful.
I can do simulations on it. It is hard to just sit in front of your
computer and have Steam sitting there, it being like you could open and
play video games instead.
As interesting as I find the simulation work and how useful it has been,
that is not where my heart is. I like to do lab work. I prefer to be in
the lab. I prefer to be meeting with people and so I think the sum of
all that the social isolation, especially when I have just moved to a
new place and have not gotten to meet anybody, plus not having access to
resources, it added up to me. I was just not being as productive as I
could be.
I am not even going to say could have been just not being as productive
compared to say like a reasonable baseline. There is a lot of pressure,
especially as a postdoc, to just always be producing, and I have had to
just step back and be like: “Look, this is just how it is.” If someone
down the line gives me some guff about it, I am going to be like: “Look
what were you doing in March 2020?”.
I hope to be able to give some of that kind of grace and understanding
to the students that I mentor into whoever I might be working with down
the line.
I had just recruited an undergraduate student to do work and it was just
bad. We had to wait. We put together a few trivial things that this
undergraduate could work on, some reading that she could have done that
sort of thing. We also mentally had to delay that research until they
were more able to access the lab, because they had to get lab training.
No one had figured it out. How do you do lab training, but not have
everyone in the same place? It took a little while to get the
coordination figured out and we did eventually get a research program
with this undergraduate off the ground. That was the other way I was
interacting with students is I did a guest lecturer for my advisor's
class. As lecturing on Zoom had a bit of a trivial components, figuring
out how to teach on screen which is not fun and tough.
Charbonneau:
What is your current work model? Are you going in every day or are you
in a hybrid where you are spending a few days at home?
Chen:
I would say that barring a sickness, or like a compelling need to stay
at home, because I do not want to commute or the weather sucks, I would
go in every day. I am at home now because I am feeling unwell, and I
will say that it is like the pandemic reminded me that I can do that.
There are ways that I can do work from home that are reasonable. But a
lot of the stuff I am doing now is applying to faculty positions, which
I can do at home.
Doing lab work I must go in. There is not much more room there to do it
otherwise.
Charbonneau:
Has your career trajectory or passion for what you are doing with fluids
changed over the pandemic?
Chen:
Every postdoc is in this position where we say what we are going to do.
We are like sussing it out still. I am applying for faculty positions.
My main goal is to end up at a primarily undergraduate institution.
Mainly be teaching, I would still be able to do some research, but I
would primarily be teaching, that is where I think my work will
crystallize.
I just applied to a USGS position like a month or two ago and they just
got back and said that my application made it through the initial HR
screen. Who knows, I will just end up being a hydrogeologist for USGS or
something like that. It is a USGS job like there are only so few of them
and this one is in Saint Paul. I do not want to move to the middle of
Missouri. Like I get to stay where I am.
Charbonneau:
Were there more people doing webinars, publications, and posting online
resources during the pandemic, or did that stay the same?
Chen:
Let us say in my specialty I did not notice a dramatic uptick in any
content. There was a lot of stuff being circulated about how to do work
from home, and what I would call toxically positive idea that you have
all this time to yourself now like you should be better out of this. I
would call it a little nonsense, but I would not say that within my
field there was a lot of significant difference.
There was some amount of people doing webinars online and that sort of
thing, but I did not see a huge change.
Charbonneau:
What strategies did you implement that worked for you to maintain your
workflow during the pandemic?
Chen:
I mean the thing about being a postdoctoral researcher is that there is
no challenging work. There are (only) a few hard deadlines in your life.
If I had a hard deadline, I find it extremely easy to get the work done
in time. I do not get distracted. Then the project is unstructured, we
are still exploring what we need to do, we do not have real deadlines,
that is where I really start to struggle.
In that space, I accepted that I was not going to be as productive. I
was fortunate that at the time I did not have a kid, my partner and I
were able to have our own kind of working spaces because she had to have
her own working space for her work requirements and so it was easy to at
least I set myself up for success, even if it was just tough.
Charbonneau:
Do you feel like there were any skill gaps related to the pandemic?
Chen:
I would say with the major caveat that this is because I am incredibly
lucky, I was lucky in the advisor that I got. I was lucky with the
timing of everything that happened. It did not really have an impact
because I was able to neatly pivot. Do this like numerical modeling with
someone who knows how to do it. I learned different skills, but I did
not lose out, say on like learning a skill or something.
I did not really spend a lot of time trying to draw blood from a stone
where I am trying to make the most out of some data or something. I
could just change it. Instead of learning this microfluidic stuff, that
weird stuff that my group does, I was learning numerical stuff.
But my experience is very uncommon compared to most other people,
especially in geosciences, because so much of what we do is field
oriented or lab oriented. I could see why NSF is interested in skill
gaps.
Charbonneau:
Do you notice any difference between the students you work with now in
comparison to pre-pandemic students?
Chen:
Absolutely. I had an intern over the summer and for a little context,
they were a non-traditional student, so they are a little bit older and
were making changes in their career path. The pandemic stood out to me
as having an enormous impact on them.
They had taken all of these, in air quotes, lab classes, but had never
stepped foot inside of a lab. This was them doing an internship with me
was the first time they had ever stepped inside a lab and worked in a
lab space in their life.
I would say that the pandemic had an enormous impact. From their
experience, it was helpful that I was able to bring them into a lab and
show them things like: "Look, this is how you weigh a thing out." This
is like how you do some of like the data analysis like me.
I will say I did not notice as much of this kind of difference in
communication, but that is just a reflection of my own experience rather
than necessarily like a reflection of general trends. But I think
learning everything via Zoom, especially the lab stuff, was a huge
disadvantage for this student because it is not the same. You can watch
someone weigh a thing out 100 times. It is not going to be the same as
you doing it.
Charbonneau:
Did the pandemic provide you with any new opportunities you might
otherwise have been aware of if it had not occurred?
Chen:
I do not think so. Even numerical modeling, I feel like the pandemic
accelerated me spending time learning how to do that stuff and ensured
that it would happen. But look, I signed up to work when the advisor who
did numerical modeling and laboratory work, he would do some fieldwork
now as well. I was hoping to do some of that branching out regardless,
and in some ways the pandemic forced that to happen instead of me just
doing lots of lab work and like trying to fit in, you know the numeric
modeling as I could.
This allowed me to like do that expansion very readily. That was one of
my goals, to expand my capabilities. I was able to do that more
efficiently because of the pandemic.
Charbonneau:
For you personally do you feel like the pandemic opened or closed more
doors or stayed the same?
Chen:
I would say it is multifaceted. I think in terms of my personal life I
would say it is a net negative. The pandemic was absolutely a net
negative. I did get to connect with some old friends. Staying connected
with some old friends was a little bit better because everyone was
Zooming each other instead of going out and doing things.
I do not really have a social network in Minneapolis. My partner, I
decided to have a child and so that also has killed really the
possibility of building out my social network. That is a strong net
negative.
I would say you know the positive side of it is I was able to focus on
myself and focus on what I was doing. Focus on my partner, and that was
nice, and it confirmed for me, we were married at that point, but it
confirmed like yes, we can coexist in this space together. We are not
struggling to do this. Yes, we can do this work or find out that it does
not work, and then that is a tough situation. But it worked. It worked
out for me.
Charbonneau:
What is a piece of advice would you give yourself for how to navigate
obstacles and changes that get thrown at you in the future?
Chen:
I would tell myself to pay attention to the lesson that you learned
about. Think about how I work best and just set myself up to do it. If
that means hacking together another place for me to work on it, that is
a different computer, that is what it means. Does it mean setting up
another user account on my computer that does not have access to the
things that are distracting on it?
I did not mention this but, over the pandemic, I also liked learning how
to manage my time better. I had not really had to do that in graduate
school, but it was often just putting fires out as the fires were
coming. Whereas here I feel like I have taken a much more elevated level
of being strategic. How am I using my time, applying it? I would
encourage myself to continue doing that.
I had another point, and it came. I felt like I lost it, and it came
back to me. It is the positive impact in job market because right again
lucky in the timing the fact all these faculty positions just shut down.
They were not offering faculty positions, and so a lot of these
universities have these big gaps that they need to fill where they had
been trying to hire and were not able to hire over the pandemic.
Now I am on the market and applying, and there are lots of positions
available. There are more job opportunities available than I have heard
in the previous year. There is particularly relevance in these positions
to the types of things that I do.
