What about the students involved in my research?
Undergraduate Students
Bio 199 – All instruction and student interaction is through remote learning this quarter.
- NOTE: Undergraduate student researchers (e.g., Bio 199 students) must work remotely—not in person—through the summer. Students being employed, e.g., work-study, can work in person if designated as essential.
UROP – The 2020 UCI Undergraduate Research Symposium has been postponed. It will take place in Fall, 2020, at a date to be announced later. The deadline for Journal submission is shifted to September 21, 2020.
For more information, faculty and students may contact the UROP Office by E-mail: urop@uci.edu.
SURP – The Summer Undergraduate Research Program is accepting applications. For more information, faculty and students may contact the UROP Office by E-mail: urop@uci.edu.
Graduate Students
Graduate student information is available at:
Following UCI Graduate Division guidelines, departments will accept scanned documents and digital signatures for all forms related to enrolled services and exceptions until further notice.
Graduate student meetings, such as annual thesis committee meetings, the advancement to candidacy exam, and the thesis defense, will be remote presentations. A remote graduate exam should provide the same level of communication and opportunity for discussion as an in-person meeting. The chair of the exam committee will be charged with ensuring that academic quality is maintained.
More info
For doctoral thesis defenses, the public research presentation should be available to the academic community; however, Graduate Council has recently changed policy because of incidences of Zoombombing. The candidate and committee now have some discretion on how they would like to convene the thesis defenses, and may appropriately restrict the audience if desired. It is recommended that appropriate security should be employed such as password protection or admission granted through a waiting room.
The Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation and Graduate Division will support the DTEI Summer Fellowship Program for summer 2020. The fellowship program will provide a stipend of $5000 for the summer, and is designed to train students to assist faculty in the development of high quality remote course delivery for the 2020/21 academic year. Students that are interested in participating in this program are strongly encouraged to apply. The application form may be found:
Graduate students are eligible for basic Zoom accounts.
Ensure students are prepared for Zoom and VPN access, and that data is accessible. Access to specialized software should be considered
Graduate student lab rotations:
Since Spring 2020 rotations were disrupted, the CMB and INP programs have offered students the option of completing a summer rotation once labs are open again. Student stipends will be covered by the schools during the summer rotations if needed.
Contact: INP Director Karina Cramer (cramerk@uci.edu) or CMB Director Peter Donovan (pdonovan@uci.edu).
Is there support for post-doctoral fellows?
UCI’s Grad Division also supports post-doctoral fellows. See their web site at:
https://grad.uci.edu/services/CampusHealthUpdates.php
NIH has a website with FAQs, including item IX: Training, Fellowship, and Career Development Awards:
https://grants.nih.gov/faqs#/covid-19.htm
How to effectively mentor in the current situation:
Every mentoring interaction is slightly different, so don’t be afraid to try different approaches as needed to identify the optimal strategy for this situation. Consider increasing the frequency of lab meetings to keep everyone connected and that mentees create fairly rigid daily routines to maintain focus.
Some suggestions for students, post-docs, and fellows:
- working on data analysis and design of experiments
- reading scientific literature
- attending journal clubs by Zoom or another platform
- attending lab meetings by Zoom or another platform
- writing drafts of manuscripts
- preparing grant/fellowship applications
- starting dissertation chapters, i.e., literature review for those not at that stage, or completing dissertations by those more advanced
- seeking journals for unsolicited reviews
- preparing research seminars, and/or posters for meetings
- preparing research seminars, and/or posters for meetings
- taking online courses to enhance skillsets for experimental work (e.g., bioinformatics, bioengineering techniques, Python, as examples)
- perform computational modeling
- review SOP techniques
- search sequence data
- secondary analysis
- work collaboratively to outline an experimental plan for a study
- work on figures for a collaborative manuscript
- enhancing career development, for example through NIH Office of Intramural Training and Education (OITE)
The NIH has collected resources for dealing with stress, developing resilience, and supporting trainees during the pandemic:
Crowd-sourced suggestions for working from home can be found at the following link, including online tutorials to learn more about bioinformatics, statistics, and image analysis to name a few.
The list comes from New PI Slack, a community of assistant professors from around the world.
https://newpislack.wordpress.com/