Collin Hudzik is a Ph.D. candidate in the Plant Biology program. For the last three Fall semesters, he has taught as a Lab TA for Bio 220. The COVID-19 pandemic presented unique challenges to his teaching experience the past Fall. In this brief interview, he discusses how the course adapted to the challenges posed by the pandemic and his own experience teaching in-person.
Did you feel anxious about teaching in-person? Were you provided with the opportunities to teach remotely?
Not really. There was a little anxiety at the beginning when I agreed to teach in person but I did feel that I could have a better connection with the students in person than I would be able to remotely. My course offered opportunities to teach in person or remotely only and I decided to teach in person. Teaching in person meant that I would essentially be doubling my in-class time where I was responsible for four sections, instead of 2. This came with the trade-off of doing a little less grading (even though it didn’t feel like it) which was picked up by the remote TAs.
How did the class change to accommodate COVID-19 safety practices?
There were a few changes to the design of Bio 220 and it was a bit complicated. The course was designed so that each section was split into A and B sections. One section would be the ‘in person’ component and the other would be an entirely remote section. For ‘in person’ sections, like the one I taught, I would have to simultaneously broadcast a zoom classroom for students who either chose to be entirely remote or were quarantining after a positive COVID test. Additionally, the in-person sections were reduced to no more than 10 students at a time to respect social distancing practices. While I was teaching the “in-person” section, the other section would be attending the remote section with a remote TA at the same time. They would switch between in-person and remotely every other week.
Could students choose to be remote or change their minds after the semester started?
Unless they were quarantining, not really. We wanted to avoid situations where students decided like they didn’t want to come for the in-person lab one week and rejoin the next week.
Were there any logistical issues with students who were required to quarantine?
For me, not really. Because I would broadcast my sections on Zoom, if a student had to quarantine, they would just join virtually. However, it was initially difficult to monitor Zoom questions while teaching in person, but with practice, it became much more manageable.
Were your students respectful of the COVID-19 safety practices?
Students in my section were extremely respectful of all COVID-19 safety practices–they were compliant with mask-wearing and social distancing guidelines. I didn’t have any issues whatsoever throughout the semester with my students.
Do you feel like you gained any new skills given the unique circumstances of the past semester?
As most of us can relate, I definitely upped my game on how to use Zoom. While I generally feel comfortable interacting with students in person, I found interacting with students only over zoom after the Thanksgiving break took a bit of getting used to.
Do you have anything else you’d like to share about this teaching experience?
In general, I don’t believe that graduate students are fairly compensated for their work—especially during the pandemic.
When you hear “life sciences” your mind probably goes to the life you spend most time thinking about — your own. For most people, this moniker conjures thoughts of our lives and those close to us, as well as the things that threaten these lives. While it’s true that life scientists study human life, we also study all other forms of life (remember kingdoms from your elementary science education?). Within the Huck Institutes, we have students and researchers working in all of these kingdoms and seamlessly transitioning between them.
Being a member of the Huck Institutes has its undeniable benefits: from access to core facilities, to a great infrastructure, to wonderful programming put on by the HGSAC. We also have the ability to create interdisciplinary partnerships between programs and research areas. These are all great opportunities that we, as students, can take advantage of. When I think about this, though, I can’t help but wonder: what can those of us firmly rooted in the Plantae kingdom provide to the larger life science community?
All of this isn’t meant to be a manifesto in defense of plants, but rather a challenge to the way that we currently approach, think about, and teach about life.
Plant blindness
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
If I were to ask you what you saw in that picture above, you would probably say a lion, and not a Kigelia (or sausage tree). You wouldn’t be incorrect by saying that, but it is an illustration of what we, as humans, notice first — the animal. We might be hard-wired to do this or it could be an evolutionary response — I’d be much more worried about being attacked by the lion than the sausage tree (sorry sausage tree, you’re probably fierce, too). This behavior of overlooking the plants has resulted in a disease that plagues our society: plant blindness.
You’re probably suffering and you don’t even know it. If I were to ask you how many plants you’ve interacted with today, you might say zero (or a few, if you had to water them. Or a lot, if you’re a plant biologist). But did you have coffee? That comes from a plant. Are your clothes made of cotton? Again, a plant. Three of the biggest drivers of our modern lives: food, fiber, and fuel, all come from plants. They’re important, and there’s a lot that we don’t know.
There are over 400,000 different species of plants on earth, 90% of which are angiosperms, or flowering plants. Taken together, their biomass dwarfs that of all animals by a factor of 1000. Despite this, plant science has remained grossly underfunded (or, as Sciencecalls us “the impoverished Cinderella in the biological research kingdom”), and calls to change this haven’t prompted much action.
Plant biologists in the Huck Institutes can help combat this problem by working with our colleagues and creating awareness. It may sound silly, but plant blindness is a serious problem. It’s not hyperbolic to say that the future of the world depends on plant science. Unlike may other basic research areas, plant science didn’t see bombastic growth in the early 2000s, and we’re not suffering from a glut of PhD-holders as a result. There are jobs!
Plants in pop culture
Recently, plant scientists have gained a bit of street cred in popular culture. Though there have been many instances in the past, most people have an awareness of Mark Watney, portrayed by Matt Damon in The Martian. In the official trailer, he says “I am the greatest botanist on this planet.” Dr. Chris Martine, a botanist and professor at Bucknell University, recently named a new species Solanum watneyi after Mark Watney because he believes that this cool botanist will revive his field. There are also real plants in space, so is it really science fiction?
Other than The Martian, though, the “plant scientist as protagonist” plot device doesn’t get much love. Chris Cooper played an orchid-hunter in Adaptation and Liam Neeson a “mild-mannered botanist” in 2011’s Unknown. Elizabeth Gilbert’s book about a botanist, The Signature of All Things, wasn’t quite as successful as Eat, Pray, Love, but it was still spreading the word. Recently, Dr. Hope Jahren published her memoir, Lab Girl, telling her story of struggle and triumph in science (see the NYT review) that has gotten quite a bit of popular press. And who can forget the educational whirlwind of Idiocracy which teaches us that plants need electrolytes.
We have gotten a bit more love in the realm of cool, educational things (not an oxymoron). Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire launched a whole new series of conversations about the co-evolution of humans and plants and how plants have shaped our society. An episode of NOVA got many people, even my Grandpa, to wonder about plant communication. The food movement, in which people have become more engaged in what’s in their food and where it comes from, has increased our interest in growing food, but has also resulted in a constant battle against misinformation. If everyone knew a plant biologist, would we be in the same place that we are right now with GMOs?
Education about plants
I’m a recovering, self-professed plant hater. I wasn’t intrigued, or even faintly interested, in plants until I started doing independent research on them halfway through college. Whether my hatred stemmed from the garden chores I had as a child is unknown, but I do know that the classroom education that I received about plants was lackluster. That’s not to say that I didn’t have phenomenal educators, but what we learned about plants left a lot to be desired. Plant scientists are developing new ways to combat this, ranging from engagement at the K-12 level through the PlantingScience program, to changing the classes taught in post-secondary education. It’s often the case, though, that student’s exposure to plants in introductory courses isn’t being done by a plant biologist but by someone who specialized in another form of biology.
Unlike Penn State, not every school has a robust plant biology research program, yet students educated in these other programs may very well go on to teach introductory biology courses, all of which have some sort of plant component. This section, usually consisting of the memorization of photosynthesis, is often met by the collective groans of students, and likely the instructor, too, if he or she has no background or connection to the plant sciences. So, team, this is where we come in.
As part of the Huck Institutes, we’re interacting daily with people who may go on to be these instructors and teach students boring things about plants. As plant biologists, we have to convince them not to do this. There are lots of cool and interesting things about plants. I mean, Buzzfeed even wrote a listicle about it. RNAi and transposable elements were first discovered in plants (if you want to keep things scientific). The banana that we all eat today is threatened and the coffee that starts each of your days may be a thing of the past soon. Maybe you don’t drink coffee, but keep that chocolate close, too. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded, in part, to Youyou Tu for her work on the isolation of a novel plant compound used for malaria treatment.
The take away? Plants are cool. And necessary. So are well-educated scientists who can educate a scientifically-literate population. We have a world to feed, and we’ll need plant biologists to do that, but we’ll also need a population that’s accepting of the science that we put forward. This requires that we have a whole cadre of scientists to stand by us, and a whole population that knows that there’s something more than photosynthesis happening with our greener brethren. Our role as plant biologists in a life science consortium like the Huck Institutes is to be sure that no one that we interact with suffers from plant blindness, and they’ll go on to do their part to eradicate it in the general population.
Assuming that you’ve made it this far, you might be interested in figuring out what you can do to improve the plant education of your future students. If you want to keep it science-heavy, you can always attend some of the plant biology seminars. You can delve into the popular media that I referenced above. You can get to know a plant biologist – we’re not too scary, and you’ll always find some of us at Huck coffee hours and happy hours! You can volunteer to help us with outreach events where we teach kids and the public about plants. You can also just grow your own plants. If you have questions about why your tomato plant looks a little funky, ask us. We’ll give you an answer that is way more than you probably need, but you’ll learn something.
Margaret Conover covered many of these same topics in a TEDx talk, and she ends with some great points. Watch that, too.
The Huck Institute sponsors a competitive grant program for graduate students to enhance their research and education. Carrie Lewis profiled the most recent batch of awardees in one ofthe first posts on The BRIDGE, but I wanted to catch up with some of our previous winners to see how the award has helped enhance their graduate school experience.
I talked with Shu Li, a student in the plant biology program and 2013 recipient of the Huck Dissertation Research Grant (then referred to as the Graduate Student Enrichment fund) to see what she’s up to.
Petunia inflata, the model system used to study SI
Shu is a 6th year plant biology student in the lab of Dr. Teh-Hui Kao studying the system of self-incompatibility (SI). Using petunia plants as a model, Shu and her labmates study this intraspecific reproductive barrier that prevents inbreeding and promotes outcrossing. Specifically, she’s trying to unravel some of the mechanisms and proteins that lead to a pistil either rejecting (incompatible) or accepting pollen, leading to fertilization and reproduction.
The SI mechanism involves a complex network of both pollen and pistil proteins.
The SI mechanism plays an important role in the development of hybrid crops and draws parallels to other self/non-self recognition systems, such as T-cell receptors and foreign antigens in adaptive immunity.
SI isn’t something that most scientists, or even plant biologists, have at the front of their minds. The Kao lab is a leader in the small field, having focused on the SI system in petunia for nearly thirty years. With few research groups generating results, students in the lab have to take tools from other fields and apply them to their own work. The Huck Dissertation Research Grant has allowed Shu to gain insight and ideas from others in plant biology by funding her travel to the American Society of Plant Biologists’ annual meeting.
Communicating science is not just a tool Shu has used to further her research, but it has become a passion of hers and something she would like to incorporate more into her career down the line. Her “if I wasn’t a scientist” dream is to be a writer. She relaxes and takes her mind off of experiments by reading, adding “my long-time favorite author is Haruki Murakami, and my favorite book of his is Kafka on the Shore. Currently I am reading Lawrence Block a lot. I admit that I am obsessed with his long-running New York-set series of stories about a recovering alcoholic personal investigator, Matthew Scudder. If you are curious about him, Eight Million Ways to Die is the one I would recommend to read.”
Shu (standing, far right) and other members and leaders of GWIS.The lab of Dr. Teh-Hui Kao
In addition to travel and communication, the research grant has provided assistance for Shu to complete some mass spectrometry work that she’s currently incorporating into a manuscript; the completion of which is fueled by copious cups of coffee. As any graduate student knows, working on a manuscript requires a certain degree of distraction, which Shu gets from working with the local Graduate Women in Science chapter, drawing, and glancing at a favorite website of hers, 1000 awesome things.
Though Shu has certainly been a successful graduate student, she has faced some challenges, ranging from the language barrier to missing the famous attributes of her hometown, Tianjin, China: food and the Chinese style stand-up show. She’s filled these voids, partially, with the friendship and support of others in the plant biology family and taking advantage of the best State College has to offer, the summer Arts Fest. And even though the rules still perplex her, she’s going to try to catch a football game before she graduates.
Shu had many words of wisdom for younger students, ranging from the mental side (“we all need to be realistic”), to the physical side (“learn how to stay relaxed”), to the practical (“before you pack for graduate school, learn how to cook tasty food in a time and effort efficient way (Oops did I include healthy as a criteria? Never mind, who cares)”). She sums up the feelings of the process of research of research nicely:
“Probably 95% of the time is searching around, collecting pieces of information and trying to figure out the clues from the mess, and it’s easy to feel like you are wasting the time and get frustrated … We have to keep our eyes open all of the time, and once we figure out the most important clue, all the information we collected on the way starts making sense, and tells us the whole story. ”
I’ve been attending the American Society of Plant Biology’s annual meeting since I was an undergrad researcher. It was my first “big” (though our ~1000 attendees comes nowhere close to other big meetings) meeting, though every year it seems to get a bit smaller – I recognize people, know their research, and already have an idea of what to expect from the conference. So what do I get out of it?
When I first starting going to this meeting, I was intimidated by the sheer number of researchers, their familiarity with one-another, and their “star status.” The more I went to the meeting, the more I started to see everyone as a colleague, and not someone by whom I should be intimidated. I started walking up to people, introducing myself, and building connections. I started to reconnect with people I had met at smaller meetings and discover that there are fewer than six degrees of separation in the plant biology community.
Plant science career survey results
A few years ago, I joined a team of attendees who assumed the responsibility of sharing our meeting via social media. My connections grew, both virtually and in real life, with researchers from industry and academia, as well as with those who have left the bench to run outreach, communication, and education programs. I was initially not into using twitter, or other social media, to promote science, but it’s proved to be an invaluable tool. If you’re not sure about it either, check out theseposts to see how science, specifically scientific conferences, and twitter can play nice.
I’ve networked with other researchers at these meetings and built fruitful collaborations, but I try to focus on more that just the science at this meeting. This year, I spent a good bit of time learning about different education initiatives that our society is embracing, including the use of Wikiedu in the classroom and the publication of interesting course materials in a new journal, CourseSource. I talked to quite a few people about open data, open access, and the use of pre-prints on bioRxiv. I spent some time going to workshops that covered topics outside of my main field, including bioinformatics and biotechnology, and getting to know the people in these areas.
Opportunity
My networking at the plant biology conferences has led to opportunities that have really enhanced my grad school experience away from the bench. Getting to know the education and outreach arm of my society provided me the opportunity to attend the White House Easter Egg Roll this past spring and teach thousands of kids about how plants grow.
When I started to wonder about the careers that those with degrees in plant biology pursue, I reached out to people who I had met at previous conferences to put together a survey to collect this information. On the first day of this year’s meeting, we unveiled the results (summarized in the infographic to the right) in conjunction with a career and networking workshop with Sarah Blackford, who runs Bioscience Careers.
Fun
I enjoy this meeting more and more every year. Maybe it’s because I know more people and see it as a reunion of sorts, maybe it’s because I’m becoming increasingly interested in the science that’s presented each year, or maybe it’s something else. Regardless of the reason, I see the meeting as a chance to travel to a fun city (hey-yo, Minneapolis) and see what it has to offer. In 2014, the meeting was in Portland, OR, which meant lots of interesting food-truck eats and micro-brews. Minneapolis offered up interesting art and plentiful outdoor activities. Next year, we go to Austin, TX, which I’m already looking forward to.
My tips for a successful conference
I really enjoy this and all the conferences that I attend. Other than just getting over initial networking hiccups, here are four tips I have on how to get the most out of your conference experience:
Don’t just hang out with the people from your lab or institution.
Go to a talk, workshop, or event that you wouldn’t normally attend.
Carry business cards, share your twitter handle, or provide some easy way for people to connect with you after the meeting.
Print your poster on fabric, both to eliminate having to carry a poster tube around and so that you can wear it as a cape!
