26: Starting Grad School During a Pandemic

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Hello, everyone. This is Dra. Yvette. I am back from my break. I know I took most of April off, because I wasn't feeling very well. At the time I was dealing with first trimester symptoms. I wasn't public with it yet, but also the first trimester sickness was also causing some flare ups with regard to my chronic illness. So it was a tough time for me with regard to managing my physical and my mental health. But thankfully, I'm doing much better now. I'm in my second trimester. While I'm not 100% in the clear- and I don't know if I ever will be, because that's what happens when you have a chronic illness- I am feeling good enough that I'm happy to return to the podcast and to bring you a new episode.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Today's topic is on starting grad school during a pandemic. And the reason I decided to talk about this is because that is what is taking up a good bulk of my time when I check in with some of the seniors that I advise through the McNair program. We have a cohort of 13 seniors, and all of them have been admitted to grad school. All of them have SIR-d, and are planning to start graduate school in the fall. If not, then shortly thereafter.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

These are some of the things that I'm having them consider that I want you to consider if you are in a similar situation where you were accepted to graduate school, you have accepted their offer, and are now trying to figure out- okay, I said, yes. I'm going. Now what? So much has changed since students were admitted. In March, we had the start of the pandemic, and I think a lot of us were hopeful that the pandemic wouldn't last as long as it looks like it will last. So some of us may have SIR-d with the idea in mind that you would start graduate school in the fall in person. At this point, it doesn't look like that's what's going to happen, at least not in a lot of places. There are a wide range of discussions that are happening nationwide among all kinds of universities about whether or not to reopen universities. And if so, what is that look like when we don't have a vaccine for the Coronavirus and a lot of people are still at risk for getting it? It's still a liability to even consider having groups gathering in large amounts or large amounts of people, large groups.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

But we have heard some news. One thing we have heard is that, for instance, the Cal State University system as a whole is going to be online in the fall. Then we know that at least- I'm in California, so I follow the updates by our governor, Governor Newsom, and any K through 12 educational updates. It looks like a lot of K through 12 schools are planning to reopen in August. But again, we don't know exactly how they're going to reopen, in what capacity. And I know that in California, we're continuing to shelter in place for at least another three months. Those are just some things that are happening right now. It's mid May, and who knows what will happen later?

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

With regard to other universities outside of the CSU's, it's a mixed bag. Some folks are saying they're reopening. Some folks are saying they're waiting until the end of summer to make that call. A lot of programs are considering a hybrid model where some smaller classes can meet in person; larger classes would be continuing online. And depending on the instructors, instructors who are at higher risk, those that are ages 65 and over would most likely be teaching online in the fall. It really is hard to say to my students- yes, you're definitely going to be required to move of out of state to start your graduate program in the fall. Unless they're an at a CSU, I can safely say, you're going to be doing everything online in the fall.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

So what are the things that are on their mind? Right now, one of the things that is on the mind of a couple of people is whether or not they should defer their admission. Deferring is not something I like to bring up often, because there are rare cases where I would recommend a student deffer. I think a lot of times, there's not so much that you can do with a gap year that you couldn't do just by starting graduate school right away. But in this case, I understand the concern. It's a very real concern, and it is very scary to think about yourself- my students are in their early 20s, so you're a young adult- moving, for a lot of them away from home for the first time in a new city. Some of my students are going to places that are hotspots for the Coronavirus, like going to New Jersey or New York. And so they're wondering, should I defer for my own health and safety?

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Then there are others- I have students who are in STEM fields- where they don't even know in what capacity they can conduct research if they're not doing research in person. Maybe their programs function on a rotation basis, where each quarter or each semester, they're working in a different lab with a different faculty advisor. They won't really get to have that experience, and it will be really hard for them to decide who they're going to work with if they don't receive that rotation experience that they were guaranteed. This is why they're considering deferring. Some students are considering deferring for a quarter or semester only. That is, if the fall is online, they're going to defer the fall and then start again in January- start their programs in January instead of in August, September, October.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

One thing that I do think is important to keep in mind if you are seriously considering deferring is you want to talk to the department and ask them, if and how this will affect your funding. Sometimes certain programs only have funding available for certain years. If you defer a year, you could lose out on that funding offer. So you want to make sure that whatever funding package you were given remains intact, even if you defer your first term or your first year.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

The other thing I want you to keep in mind is what will you do, and how will you make ends meet if you do defer? Some students are understandably concerned about their health and safety. At the same time, they might not have many options for work or for sustaining themselves at home. If that's the case, then what are you going to do with your time? What are you going to do without the access to the resources that you had as a student? As a student, you've got access to health care. You've got access to university resources and professionals, and you're getting paid a small stipend. Is it really worthwhile to defer if you don't have a plan for what you're going to do if you're home?

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

The other thing is, before making a decision, you don't want to just make a decision based on how you're feeling now. You want to make an informed decision. So you want to consult with the department to find out as much as you can about what is realistically going to happen in the fall. What are the expectations for the fall? Don't make a decision unless or until they tell you, with as much certainty as possible, what their approach is going to be for the fall. Is it going to be online? Is it going to be in person? Is it going to be a combination of the two? Find that out. Then you want to do a cost-benefit analysis of staying home versus starting grad school. Let's say you have to stay home to take care of a loved one. That is completely understandable. You have to stay home to get a job and save up as much as you can, to both help your family and also save up for the move to go to graduate school. That's understandable too. So think about it. Come up with a plan, and don't just make a rash decision when it comes to deferring.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

The next thing I want to talk about are financial considerations. Most of the students that I work with are low income, which means that a lot of them have never had to move far away from their families. They haven't had to budget for this type of expense. So they may not realize just how expensive it is to move. What I am asking them to consider is, well, first off, I want them to know that there are expenses that they will incur that have to do with moving. Whether that is the actual cost to ship materials from one place to another, your flight to get from one place to another, you're paying for your first month's rent plus security deposit, wherever it is that you get housing.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Some students are lucky that they were able to get some funding for relocation expenses from the program that they were accepted into. But even though they say they're giving you funding, they're not just gonna give you a check before you're a student for you to spend on whatever it is that comes up. Most likely, they're going to wait until you're an enrolled student in the fall, and then they will provide you with funding on a reimbursement basis. In case you're not familiar with reimbursement processes, they take time. They require that you organize, gather your receipts, and fill out paperwork. This is going to be a continuous, really tedious process that you're going to go through from graduate school through the rest of your career. This is university bureaucracy. It's really annoying, yes, but you're gonna have to be dealing with reimbursement processes for a very long time. If you haven't already considered getting a credit card, I would recommend starting to build your budget, getting a credit card, learning how to use it wisely. Only spend on things that you know you can pay off. Only use it for things like emergencies. When circumstances come up in which you know you're gonna get reimbursed, that's a good idea to start using a credit card. A lot of grad students who are low income, we don't have that kind of disposable income to just be dropping money at all times, and then waiting for us to get paid back later.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

So you want to use this time to save. If you don't have a part time job- and if you can- now is a good time to look into getting a part time job. I know it's much harder to secure jobs right now, under our current circumstances. And it also depends on how comfortable you feel with security a job as an essential worker. There are some online gigs that some students are considering, like tutoring options. Also, some of our students are working as interpreters or translating for folks. Obviously we have students who work at grocery stores, or who work for DoorDash and different companies that will deliver groceries. That's based on your comfort level, how comfortable you feel with exposing yourself and working outside of your home. Do your best to try to search for part time jobs so that you can start to save. In the past, what our students would do is they would try to secure a full time job immediately after graduating. They would work that full time job through the end of summer until they had to move to go to graduate school. Then they'd let go of that job and use that money for their moving expenses.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

What other students have done in the past if they weren't able to successfully secure a job is they would start a GoFundMe. They would fundraise. I know not everybody's comfortable with doing this, but I have seen and I have contributed to several GoFundMe accounts for students who are fundraising to start graduate school. It is an understandable reason to ask for money from friends and loved ones, if you're comfortable.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Another option that I've seen students do is they have taken out a student loan during their senior year of college, and then they save that money. That's the money they use for their moving expenses. I typically don't recommend taking on student debt, but our circumstances right now are not ordinary. In this case, I don't think it's a bad idea. The more money you can have saved up for emergencies, for anything that comes up from now until when you start graduate school and you start to get your consistent paycheck, the better off you'll be. So it's not a bad idea- if you qualify- to get a student loan that you can then use and save up the money. If you don't end up using that money, okay, go ahead and pay off your student loan. That won't hurt you. But if you need it and you have it, it's nice to have that as an option.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Then another thing that's really important to find out- in fact, you may want to find out about this before you make any plans, any budget, or even consider how much you want to save for relocation expenses. What you really need to know is when you're going to get your first paycheck. Odds are, if you got into a Ph.D program, you received a funding package. In that funding package, they told you what your annual stipend or annual funding is going to be. Let's say your stipend is anywhere from 20, 25 or $30,000 a year. You want to know, when are you going to get your first paycheck, and how often are you going to get paid? Are you getting one lump sum per term? So one paycheck per quarter or per semester? Or are you getting paid monthly? If so, how much is it going to be? Then once you know what your monthly amount is going to be, of course, you absolutely must create a monthly budget. You want to think about how much you're going to spend on housing. Look up what is the average cost of living in that area. Then, based on the cost of living, and your stipend- how much money you're going to be getting- you need to come up with the figure of what is the maximum amount of money you can afford for housing. That will then determine if you can afford to live on your own, or in your own bedroom without a roommate, or if you may need multiple roommates to make ends meet.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

That monthly budget, where you account for your bills, where you account for your living expenses, that's going to help you. Once you do arrive, once you have started the fall term, you will have a better sense of how much money is coming in, how much money is coming out, and you might even be able to budget, just only bare bones budget, and save the rest. Again, now is a time that we all want to save as much as we can because we don't know how much our circumstances are going to change because of this very unstable, unpredictable pandemic. So those are the financial considerations. I'm sure I could go into detail with how to create a budget, with how much you should save for relocating, but really, those things are on a case by case basis. I don't want to mention one example if it doesn't apply to a good number of you.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Another consideration, another thing to keep in mind is housing. So you're planning to start graduate school in the fall, you're wondering, am I actually going to be required to move? What happens if there's another shelter in place requirement? What happens if I can't travel there, and I've secured housing? Am I going to lose out on that money that I put in to sign my lease? For housing, I highly recommend - if you can- to figure out a way to get set up with on campus housing. Get on that waitlist. Apply for on campus housing, because if circumstances change and your housing is through the university, the university will likely be more flexible with not docking you and not having you pay any fees or not keeping your security deposit. There's more of a safety net there if you were to get your housing through the university. Also, a lot of times university housing is furnished, which means that you're not going to have to worry about paying for furniture once you're there. Again, you only want to take the bare minimum that you need to take when you move there. You don't want to be paying to ship a million items to another state. So on campus housing is my recommendation number one.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

If that's not a possibility, the next thing I would say is to contact grad students in the department in the program that you're going to be starting at in the fall, and see if any of them are looking for roommates or suitemates. Possibly secure housing through them. The reason I say that is because then they won't be able to commiserate and understand what you're going through. In the case that you do have to shelter in place after having moved there, you won't be alone. You will have some sort of support system in the space that you're sheltering in.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

If that doesn't work, consider other off campus living options that include roommates, who ideally are also graduate students. Again, now is not the time- even if you're introverted like me- now is not the time where I recommend for you to find your own studio and live by yourself. I do think that for your own mental health and well being, it's good to have some sort of roommate or housemates that can be there, that can help out with things. Whether that's figuring out a system so that you can get each other's groceries, or run each other's errands, or help each other out with domestic labor. It's just nice to have help and to not be completely on your own. I know that some of my students who are living alone- I had one student who scheduled an appointment with me, and I didn't know why he was meeting with me. When I met with him and I asked him, what do you want to meet about? He told me, I just wanted to hear someone on the phone. I just wanted to have contact with someone outside of my room. And admittedly, this student is more of an extrovert, but I felt so bad for him because he's been stuck in his room alone for several weeks, and is in need of some sort of contact, some sort of support that's not just virtual- because a lot of us are feeling zoomed out- that's in person. So if you can, find some sort of housing with roommates, and think about a backup plan in case you don't move there in the fall.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

What most of my students are actually doing is they're all assuming that they're going to move in the fall, and then if they have to either take classes online, or if they're going to be part of some sort of hybrid model, they're planning to do that, having moved there. So their goal is to move if they can, and then figure things out from there. I don't have too many students who plan to stay home and try to start graduate school from home. That is a very hard thing to do. If you're like many of my students, a lot of my students have working class families, immigrant parents, siblings. They have to care for other individuals, whether it's helping to care for a parent or grandparent, or just they have a lot of responsibilities at home. That takes away from their time to study right now, and that what's making it really hard for them to focus on finishing their last quarter at UC Santa Barbara. So I can only imagine just how hard it will be to start graduate school if you're at home living under those circumstances. So if you can, I would recommend that you also do what my students are doing. Plan to move in the fall if you can, and then come up with a backup plan for how you will manage if you're in a new city, and you have to shelter in place.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

All right. So what else do I want to say about the fall and what fall will really look like for you, if you're 100%, determined to start, and to start this year? I hate to be the bearer of bad news. This is my little reality check to folks who maybe are being overly optimistic. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the Coronavirus is going anywhere, anytime soon. So if you're thinking, oh, things will be better by the fall. It will be gone. Most likely, there will continue to be multiple waves of this. And there will be recurrences, especially in the fall. I hear that in the summer it dies down, but in the winter, it just comes back with a vengeance. Those are the predictions they're making. So with that in mind, you want to kind of become as comfortable as possible with online classes, with the technology that's available to us right now, with familiarizing yourself with multiple platforms - Microsoft Teams, zoom, Google Hangouts, Google Calendar. Whatever online websites that are used for your classes. Message boards, things like that. You want to acquaint yourself. Become really comfortable with this, because we will continue to have some sort of online instruction in some capacity for the time being. I also think that we need to start to feel more comfortable with figuring out what our new normal is going to be. The new normal will include social distancing practices, making that more of a common thing from here on now, wearing facial coverings, face masks, when you're out, and just being generally being more careful when you're around others, and not trying to congregate in large groups.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

How will this affect you? It could affect your physical health. Some students are trying to avoid going out, and so as a result, they don't have access to gyms, to hiking trails, to any classes they used to take- fitness classes. And so you've got to figure out, what ways can I stay active if I'm not able to do what I used to do before? How can I do it from home? How can I do it within the area that I live in? Then mental health is huge, because the rates of depression and just mental health issues as a whole in graduate school are so high, I can only imagine that they're going to worsen with our current circumstances because of the added isolation. So because of that, I highly recommend as soon as you start graduate school, to find out what the resources are that are available. Find out what you have that you qualify for when it comes to your health insurance and access to mental health providers. Find a therapist as soon as possible. I can't stress that enough. I know this sounds weird. I'm talking about oh, you're starting grad school in the fall. One of my biggest recommendations is to find a therapist. But yes, as much as you may think that you have a very strong support system, tight group of friends or family that you can call at any time. That may be true. It's still beneficial to have this third party, this neutral individual who you can check in with hopefully on a regular basis, if not maybe bi weekly or monthly. Just to make sure that everything is okay to get their professional opinion and advice on your circumstances. Even if you're not struggling, even if you don't feel like you are having any issues with feeling down or feeling anxious, it can only help you not hurt you to do that.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

Then of course finding out about other resources too. What else does that university provide to you that you wouldn't otherwise have if you were at home? I think that is all I really wanted to do is just pprioritize your mental health, your physical health. Right now, if you're still a student is great, you're getting a bit of a preview of what it's like to be a graduate student, because graduate school for many programs does involve a lot of solitary work where you're doing your research. Even if you know if it's in the lab setting at some point, you're having to write a dissertation at some point, you're having to study for qualifying exams. If you're struggling with your online classes, now's the time to figure out a system that works for you. Taking breaks, timing yourself, having accountability buddies, study groups, writing groups, whatever it is that works for you. Try to figure that out. What kind of workspace is best for you? What time of day for you to work is best?

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

If you are struggling with time management, now's the time to explore some options in terms of applications you can use that will help you with your efficiency, utilizing calendars, planners. And not just planning ahead, but I also encourage my students to do something called Reverse Planning, where at the end of the day, you update your calendar based on what you actually did accomplish, and how long things actually took you. That way you can go back. If you reverse plan every day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, you'll start to notice trends. You'll start to notice habits. You'll start to notice when you have better days, when you have off days, when you're more productive. And what got in the way, or what worked well, so that you can kind of replicate the good circumstances to continue to do your best, as best as you can within within our current circumstances.

Dra. Yvette Martínez-Vu

That is all I'm gonna say for now. I hope that you found some of this helpful. For those of you that are planning to start grad school in the fall, I am so so sorry that you're starting under these circumstances. But at the same time, at the very least you're guaranteed some funding. At the very least you have something to do. Your circumstances could always be worse, and I wish you the best. I hope that you're able to identify the support system, wherever it is that you start in the fall. If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me either on Instagram or over email. Hope you have a wonderful rest of the week.