š¤Æ A guide to losing your mind: grad school during a pandemic
oh, and make sure youāre working full-time, too
According to Guinness World Records, the longest anyone has voluntarily held their breath is just over 24 minutes. For the average human however, this number is capped at somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes. But what happens when we hold our breath for an extended period of time? Critically (and perhaps obviously) one effect is that we start to lose oxygen ā an element our brains need to function. When oxygen is lost, the individual holding their breath can experience symptoms such as confusion or altered decision making. Iāve also found that this is the best way to describe my own state over the course of the past year. A year not only dedicated to academic pursuits, but one also coupled with full-time work and a full-blown pandemic that my country canāt seem to get under control (amongst many other systemic ills we canāt seem to extinguish).
Iāve realized that I have been figuratively holding my breath for the past six months. Perhaps we all have.
But it didnāt start out this way. I didnāt know that a pandemic was coming (and sure, few of us did, or at least we chose to comfortably ignore what many scientists have warned of for decades). The first six months of my program were relatively smooth sailing ā barring the major adjustment of losing my freedom of activity on the weekends and evenings. My life quickly became a cycle of: rise, computer, eat, computer, sleep. This cycle repeated itself seven days a week, but at least I had signed up for it.
š§ How did I get here?
I turned to grad school because I sought to learn more about the underpinnings of the field with which I had fallen in love and within which I had established a career. I chose the MHCID program at UC Irvine in particular because I wanted all of this while holding onto precious time in industry, where I believe is one of the best places to learn.
During the first six months of the program, I was met with plenty of opportunities to tie my education back to the business needs of my organization. I applied newly learned research methods: quantitative usability testing helped benchmark our existing websiteās usability before a redesign, and a competitive analysis validated and refined our B2B value proposition. I grew through interrogating my existing contextual inquiry practices and comparing them to ethnographic theory. During a quarter-long research methods class, I read endless academic literature centered on the foundations of ethnography and the field of HCI. My understanding of the work that I had often conducted in my day-to-day (with little to no understanding of its origins) was dramatically expanded. As a result, Iām more fit to reach into the vast research and design toolkit we have as HCI practitioners, and to determine the right study design and approach for the many problems weāre asked to understand and to solve.
In particular, Carol Baileyās A Guide to Qualitative Field Research provided me research canon with which to mature my practice. Iāve learned to adopt fieldwork planning questions focused on my role as an observer for future ethnographic inquiries (if and when weāre able to safely conduct field research again) such as, āWill this beā¦ covert or overt?,ā āā¦participant or nonparticipant?,ā āā¦structured or unstructured?,ā and āWhat are the boundaries of my observation?.Ā¹ā
š¦ But then, the pandemic hit.
Suddenly, it felt as though the standard choice architecture of our day-to-day lives was turned on its head ā that we no longer had control over where we worked or the resulting distractions weād face during our workdays (and nights and weekends in my case).
What Iāve realized, however, is that this choice architecture was already stacked against us and that really, we had a false sense of choice when it came to working conditions. Pre-pandemic, the jobs we often took didnāt even offer fully remote options or flexible working arrangements. As a result, we didnāt have a choice but to commute into central offices, in turn limiting our choices of where to live.
In a literature review I conducted during my final quarter of school, I investigated topics at the intersection of transportation demand management, flexible working arrangements, and workforce visibility. These topics were top-of-mind for me not only because of the situation the pandemic put me in:
suddenly being forced to work from a studio apartment, juggling video call times and spaces with my partner, finding my already off-kilter sense of āwork-school-life-balanceā getting more and more wobbly, the blue glow of the computer screen taking up the majority of my days as commutes and other āoutsideā activities vanishedā¦
ā¦but also because they were integral to the transportation start-up where I lead UX: Scoop. One of the key insights from my literature review was that
the predicted shift toward telecommuting adoption has historically been dramatically overestimated.
Predictions in telecommuting adoption have ranged over the years, with some estimates claiming that the number of telecommuters in the U.S. would have reached 50 million by 2020Ā². Another insight was that
telecommuting really isnāt for everyone.
And while this might sound obvious, the data show that a number of characteristics (gender, age, car access, length of commute, income level, etc.) can influence the propensity to adopt flexible working arrangements, telecommuting in particularĀ² Ā³ ā“. This means that choice dynamics to partake in remote work are much more complex than mode choice alone.
As a reaction to the pandemic and our newfound ability (albeit not by choice) to work from home ā for many knowledge workers, at least ā thereās now a big push to adopt remote working policies more broadly. Given my investigation of existing literature in this space, Iām personally a bit skeptical of the adoption rates weāll actually see ā both in employer offering and in employee adoption. This leaves me wary of our readiness for the vast undertaking this would require, despite telecommunications improvements that technically enable this shift. It has also left me weary as I found the wide spectrum of social, shared experiences reduced to the confines of that same two-dimensional Zoom window.
Relatedly, during my last quarter, we conducted a survey of MHCID alumni to understand how theyāre coping with working during the pandemic and how well their mostly-virtual graduate experience prepared them for our current circumstances. What I found in analyzing the results was that
employees were not getting all of the remote working benefits they felt they needed in order to perform their jobs successfully.
In fact, respondents were claiming that they still needed access to basic things such as internet improvement reimbursements ā at five times the rate that it was being offered. Flexible work hours, on the other hand, was desired 42% less than the rate at which it was being offered to employees.
All the while, at work at the outset of the pandemic, I designed and administered a series of surveys targeting both our entire Scoop user population and a nationally representative sample of commuters. One of the most fascinating insights revealed was that less than 40% of respondents had received work-from-home guidelines at the time. Even further, while over 60% of workers felt focused at home,
less than a third of them felt socially connected, versus 72% of respondents reporting feeling socially connected while working from an office.
These reported sentiments are feelings Iāve shared while navigating two intensive environments (work and grad school) while fully remote. My figurative bandwidth was already strained by balancing these two responsibilities, but all of a sudden my actual bandwidth was a concern, and I found myself spending a disproportionate amount of time stressing about whether my internet was good enough for yet another eight-hour day of back-to-back video calls.
Iām sure that improvements to fostering social connectivity have been made in the months since my survey first launched. And as an aside, weāve since been conducting monthly pulse surveys to monitor general WFH sentiments longitudinally, so Iām excited to continue to track and understand what further unfolds before us. Truthfully though, we have to find ways to feed our social nature in this new context.
š Is there hope?
Aside from how we challenge the workplace to adapt to our evolving needs, one thing that brings me hope is my understanding that humans are incredibly adaptable creatures. When faced with a lack of choice, we (try our damndest to) find ways to reclaim agency. I observed this back in the beginning of my program ā before the dark days ā when I conducted field research to investigate how a new church in Oakland planned to adapt, both to and with, technologies and secularism in order to maintain relevance with the next generation of āchurchgoers.ā The founder and lead pastor of this church chose to borrow from and emulate new technical and social structures that had evolved around the outdated church model. I observed this in the last few weeks of my program when a member of my capstone group made the independent decision to opt out of the advisor-led meetings that they didnāt find valuable ā without regard for those of us who still had to attend those meetings. What of the value of our own time?
As I write this in my final week of graduate school, in what seems to be an ever-unfurling pandemic peak ā my masked lungs filled to capacity, my brain having made many poor decisions over the past six months ā decisions like: ājust keep going at full steam,ā or, ārequest a regrade of that assignment you received B+ on, even though your total grade for the class sits at a 98%, instead of using that time to get away from your computer, to go for a walk,ā
I think Iām finally starting to exhale.
I think that at the intersection of work, grad school, and a pandemic is the realization that we really need to lower our expectations of ourselves (of course, Iām not the only one who has come to this conclusion). Especially now. Especially during a pandemic, when our sense of self and our sense of normalcy are nearly bankrupt. But it shouldnāt have taken these three things colliding; it shouldnāt have taken countless shed tears and moments questioning my purpose and my worth.
To be clear, Iām actually incredibly proud of myself for accomplishing this feat ā and it would have been a feat even without the pandemic element. Iām coming out of grad school with a clear understanding of why the field of HCI is so important to the future of our technology-saturated world. Early discussions I had with my classmates about how the field of HCI and UX are at risk of serving increasingly small and increasingly privileged populations stick with me today.
One of the most important skills we have as UX professionals is our ability to empathize; to see these inequities and to advocate for our users (and hopefully increasingly for those who arenāt represented in our user base). But I also wonder: Are we empathizing with ourselves? Are we investigating our own needs, especially as we navigate these [insert your choice of popularized words: uncertain, unprecedented] times?
As I prepare myself to close this formative chapter in my life, Iāve made the decision to finally listen to my needs ā not my wants (user research and psychology 101), which are largely hegemonic constructs of what it means to be āsuccessfulā or āproductive.ā Iām going to take the underpinnings of what it means to design a usable system and apply them to designing a meaningful next chapter in which I advocate for my own well-being. For the well-being of my community. To listen to the needs we face based on our newfound and largely unchosen lived experiences, and use that understanding to make the āuser experienceā of living ā and working ā during a pandemic less of a mind-losing experience.
To start, Iām going to lower the damn bar for myself.
[1] Bailey, C. A. (2018). 6. In A guide to qualitative field research. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
[2] Nilles, J. (1991). Telecommuting and urban sprawl: Mitigator or inciter? Transportation, 18(4). doi:10.1007/bf00186567
[3] Handy, S., & Mokhtarian, P. (1996). Forecasting telecommuting. Transportation, 23(2). doi:10.1007/bf00170034
[4] Sener, I. N., & Bhat, C. R. (2011). A Copula-Based Sample Selection Model of Telecommuting Choice and Frequency. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 43(1), 126ā145. doi:10.1068/a43133
