A “Virtual” Breakfast with Industry.
Our amazing BWI Chair (Katherine Decker) with our keynote speaker (Dr. Ted Love). Deepan Thiruppathy, a 2nd year graduate student, participated in the live Q/A on our networking platform, Remo.
Prof Talk with Professor Pedro Cabrales hosted by Alyssa Chiang.
Graduate students having a really fun time with Pedro learning about his personal experiences and beer brewing hobby.
BEGS: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome the Virtual Format
It would be incorrect, and very much a flat out lie, to say that everyone in the Bioengineering Graduate Society (BEGS) loved the idea of virtual events. We wouldn’t acknowledge it, but we all hated the idea of Zoom hangouts after 8 hours of Zoom meetings. In the past, most of the BioE graduate students were comfortable hanging in the graduate lounge to interact with fellow graduate students.
After a trial run of virtual gatherings in Spring 2020, it already seemed like an uphill battle to implement and cultivate ideas for events. But, did our best to try to put on a good show.
To kick off the school year, we hosted our 8th annual Bear Hug Social, organized by Bear Hug Chair, Clara Posner, through the virtual networking platform, Remo. Bear Hug serves as a great way to introduce the incoming 1st year graduate students to the rest of the department, see old friends, and celebrate the start of the academic year. Dr. Kun Zhang, the chair of the department, welcomed the incoming graduate students to the department. With approximately 80 attendees, including graduate students, faculty, and industry board representatives, we became more excited at the prospect of tackling virtual gatherings.
In November 2020, we held Breakfast with Industry (BWI). Typically during BWI, BioE graduate students meet industry members in the greater San Diego area. However, virtual gatherings allowed us expand to include industry members outside of San Diego, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston. Our keynote speaker, Dr. Ted Love, President and CEO of Global Blood Therapeutics, delivered an inspiring lecture and Q&A session on his life story and accomplishments in industry to motivate graduate students and to provide insight into pursuing multiple avenues for success. Other industry events organized by BEGS include an Illumina Grad Internship Information session, an Annual Department Biotech Virtual Career Fair, Entrepreneurship in Biotech Panel, and an alumni talk from Shoun Matsuka about his experience at NuVasive.
Mentorship has been a crucial need during a virtual year. Mentorship Chair, Clara Posner, and Mentorship Program Lead, Yash Mantri, spearheaded the new mentorship program, in which we paired first year graduate students with more senior graduate student mentors. We also hosted events specifically for mentor-mentee bonding like the Goal Setting Workshop organized by Deepan Thiruppathy and the Powerpoint party led by Michael Fitzgerald.. In collaboration with the Women in Bioengineering (WBE) organization, Alyssa Chiang hosted virtual Professor workshops like the Graduate Student Success Workshop led by Professor Ester Kwon and virtual informal talks with Professors Schmid-Schoenbein, Cabrales, Contijoch, and Valdez-Jasso, during which we learned how they navigated their career paths and what they do for fun outside of research. We also hosted graduate student panel discussions about various graduate school topics like choosing your research advisor, managing your relationship with your PI, and taking care of your mental health in graduate school. Andrew Perley also started compiling a new BEGS fellowships and training grants resource document and Patrick Kasl is currently developing a BioE graduate student database to help fellow BioE graduate students find new friends and resources in the department!
In addition, to provide the greater BioE graduate community access to resources and to answers for specific questions, BEGS created a Discord to allow us to virtually come together as a community. We provided text channels for Q/A, games, introductions, and even a channel to encourage productivity during the pandemic. Our BEGS Discord has been active to encourage the BioE community to get together, albeit virtually.
As future leaders of our field, we understand that the community we can impact and support goes beyond that of UCSD. While it was difficult to coordinate and envision, great efforts were made in the realm of our high school and festival outreach. An initiative by Abigail Teitgen, Elizabeth Heyde, and Karl Wessendorf-Rodriguez, Outreach co-chairs, resulted in the creation of a YouTube channel and online resources meant to highlight the diversity of backgrounds and interests that make up the BioE community at UCSD. We participated in the San Diego Science and Engineering Festival and put together three online demos meant to highlight some of the skills and areas of expertise we garner in the committee. Additionally, we were able to coordinate with high school teachers at Clairemont high school to lead online demos showing students key concepts in bioinformatics, as well as engineering, through building a DIY lung model. While we did a great job considering the circumstances of 2020 and early 2021, we are looking forward to continuing our Outreach tradition in person.
A diagram of how super connected BioE Graduate students will be with our new Grad Database (Initiative Lead: Patrick Kasl).
According to Metcalfe’s law, the value of a network scales with the square of the number of users.
Virtual Demos for the San Diego Science and Engineering Festival.
A) Simplified model used to show the function of the diaphragm. B) TLC plate showing extracts from spinach, carrots, and purple carrots to explain solubility and chemical interactions between a solid and liquid phase.
To encourage further recruitment to the department, we hosted PhD recruitment virtually with the help of a 30-person Recruitment Committee. While it was hard to show off beautiful San Diego to potential graduate students, we attempted to make recruitment as interactive and as informative as possible through an interactive website (begs.ucsd.edu/recruitment-2021.html) and videos.
To kick off the next school year, BEGS is hoping to reinvigorate the BioE graduate community through in-person events. We’ll continue to improve, adapt, and overcome.