Like other students in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, graduate students based at Cornell AgriTech are adapting to the challenges of remote learning during the COVID-19 crisis. As students from the Geneva campus continue to pursue their academic degrees from remote locations, some needed to complete their degree virtually. Chris Peritore-Galve, a Ph.D. student studying under Chris Smart, professor of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology, recently defended his Ph.D. dissertation via Zoom. We asked him to tell us what that was like.
What have you been doing to continue your academic studies from a remote location?
My first step after we were notified of the shutdown was to prepare a nice work space in my house with essential office supplies like a wireless mouse, keyboard and extra monitor to help me write. I rigged up an ergonomic desk using piles of books, which has worked just fine. My second step was to lower my expectations for myself by a lot. Seriously, there is no way that we can expect ourselves to be “normally” productive during a global pandemic. So I would schedule menial things like feeding the birds and taking a break to go outside to make sure that I didn’t just sit in my office all day. I was very fortunate to already be in writing mode. I didn’t have to collect any more data to write my dissertation. I am also lucky that I had already written the largest portion of it before the pandemic. To maintain productivity while writing I would set a timer for ten minutes, during which I was not allowed to get distracted and would focus on writing. Typically, I would keep writing past the timer and take a break when I started running out of steam.
What have Cornell AgriTech faculty members done to support your remote learning and your Ph.D. dissertation?
My advisor, Chris Smart, has had weekly meetings with each person in the lab. We have a weekly lab meeting where we read a popular science article on unrelated topics – like strategies to colonize the moon, the restoration of Notre Dame, thousand-year-old Siberian squirrels, or synthetic cells – and then we talk about the articles. We also have a lab coffee break every day where we chat informally about random things that we’re doing.