Graduate Student Leadership in the Time of COVID
Dear Chemistry Colleagues,
This month I’m pleased to team up with Lily Mawby, president of the Graduate Student Association (GSA), to bring you this message. The GSA is in its sixth year as a recognized student organization and is continually evolving. Our chemistry graduate students continue to make amazing contributions to many parts of the department, working harder than ever during the pandemic. The GSA board has broadened to include more leadership opportunities to a wider array of graduate students by creating outreach and professional development delegates. Recently, the GSA’s professional development committee hosted a virtual homecoming roundtable that brought eighteen alumni together with graduate and undergraduate students to talk about their career paths. These included PhD, masters, and bachelors graduates from all facets of industry, government work, and unique roles in academia.
The Chemistry Climate and Diversity Committee has also been supporting our graduate students. They recently hosted stress relief and imposter syndrome workshops. The stress relief workshop focused on the negative effects our stress can have physically as well as mentally and provided attendees with coping methods for relief including a short meditation session at the end. The imposter syndrome workshop normalized the syndrome and most participants shared their own experiences. Stress relief has been very important, not only because of COVID but because of the election season, with the most important election in a generation happening in less than a week. This has been a stressor for graduate students, undergraduate students, and faculty alike. All of us—faculty and students—appreciate the note from Dean Langkilde, which describes how to empathize with and how to help students cope.
Our graduate students continue to play important roles in reaching out to our chemistry community and beyond. They have been essential in helping our new students get acclimated. This summer, they played key roles in the graduate student orientation through hosting zoom lunches with virtual games and advising students on their class choices. They are continuing to assist our international students with their arrival, joining groups, and feeling at home. They have set up coffee hours with labs in the last week of October and first week of November, and, so far, twenty labs have signed up! In addition, there have been several graduate student panels to help our first year students, in which they posed questions to senior graduate students to help them get oriented. This is especially key during the pandemic. Our graduate students have been involved in the seminar series this semester as well, and four students have invited seminar speakers for next semester.
Finally, the GSA launched the Virtual Scientist program to continue safely providing outreach to our community during the pandemic. Through live webinars, the Virtual Scientist program provides parents with demonstrations they can do at home with their kids using household products. This is being live-streamed on Sundays, and an upcoming video was crafted by the Sen lab! Efforts are being multiplied by grant writing to NASA with volunteers in the Department of Chemistry and Graduate Women in Science (GWIS).
The GSA is also making important commitments to diversity. Through recent alumni and undergraduate t-shirt sales, they raised and donated over $180 to the Penn State chapter of NOBCChE (the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers). The GSA is also partnering with the BMMB GSA to host a fundraiser in support of Black Lives Matter with a goal of raising $2,500 by November 20. They will be donating proceeds to the charities Showing Up for Racial Justice, Equal Justice Initiative, and Communities for Just Schools Fund, and all are invited to contribute. This is in addition to the GSA’s work earlier in the year to support Black-owned companies through purchasing masks. Looking forward, the GSA will be partnering with GWIS to start a series called “Conversations with Women in Chemistry” for women undergraduates to come talk to women graduate students about experiences in chemistry beginning the week of November 1st.
A lot of these activities rely on the help and advice of the GSA’s staff advisor, Crista Spratt, so we don’t want to close without mentioning how grateful our entire chemistry community is to Crista and to congratulate her on her well-deserved award.
We want to close by inviting the entire department to participate in these events and to share ways to continue to make the department a welcoming place to its students, postdoctoral fellows, staff, and faculty. We wish you all the best in the months ahead!
With Warm Wishes,
Phil and Lily