Becoming a Leader in a Pandemic: Lauren Biegel
Name: Lauren Biegel
Hometown and Current Location: Houston, TX
If you asked her when she was in high school, Lauren Biegel never would have expected to be in a student leadership position at Rice University.
Nonetheless, here she is, one of eleven residential college presidents at Rice, leading a community of students in the midst of what is likely the strangest school year she could possibly have imagined: one that is highly restricted by guidelines due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States.
As a former college president myself, I was extremely excited to talk to Lauren about her experiences so far. And despite the fact that the challenges she is facing as a leader are entirely different and much more consequential than the ones I faced during my term, I was able to find a lot of parallels to my own experience. Her story of growth and self-discovery through leadership is likely something that many Zillennial women have experienced in recent years as we age into adulthood.
STUDENT LEADERSHIP IN THE AGE OF CORONAVIRUS
Taking the lead in a crisis
First, some context: Readers who aren’t familiar with Rice can think of Rice’s residential colleges like the houses in Harry Potter: it’s the community where a student lives, eats, and socializes during their undergraduate experience. Of course, everyone has the freedom to determine their own degree of participation, but engagement with the colleges is rather high at Rice, simply because it is a large part of the university’s culture.
Lauren was elected the President of Wiess Residential College at Rice University in February 2020, just weeks before COVID-19 struck in full force in the United States. When she was elected, there was no way she could have expected the real-world challenges she’d have to face as a student leader due to the pandemic.
Student leaders at Rice often experience both the blessing and the curse of being given a lot of trust by administration. The residential college presidents are often looked to by university officials to provide a student perspective on important issues, but that can put a lot of pressure on student leaders’ backs when they are asked to manage sensitive information and make highly-consequential choices.
“I think that the stakes got really high really fast, for sure,” Lauren remembers. She was off campus with a group of friends, who happened to be seniors, when the college presidents were informed that Rice’s campus would be shutting down in March. However, the rest of campus wasn’t supposed to find out for a few more hours, so she wasn’t allowed to tell her friends that these would be their last few days together before graduation. Even though she wasn’t able to break the real news, she gave them a warning: “I was like, ‘Y’all have a lot of fun today. Like you guys just enjoy, you know, enjoy it,’” she shares.
Once the entirety of campus was informed of the shutdown, the logistics of getting everyone off campus with such short notice became the next immediate challenge. Lauren and other student leaders had to help their peers figure out how to get themselves home, which was especially a challenge for international students who weren’t even sure that there would be flights back to their countries. At the time, it wasn’t even clear whether domestic flights would be available.
There were also the emotional elements of this last-minute change in the middle of the semester. In a true demonstration of the Wiess community spirit, Lauren and other Wiess Leadership honored the Wiess Class of 2020 with a mini graduation. Wiessmen were able to wear their graduation caps and gowns and walk across a tiny stage in the Wiess commons to give them some semblance of closure for their Rice experience. For many Wiess seniors, this was one of the last in-person events at Rice with their peers and friends from the prior 4 years.
Finding a path forward
After getting through the initial response to the campus shutdown, it was clear to Lauren that her term as Wiess president wasn’t going to be a normal experience. Things that she thought were going to be important during her term suddenly didn’t seem relevant, because safety became the priority.
Immediately after everyone was sent home, there were the longer-term issues of figuring out how to bring a community together virtually and support students from afar. Students managed as best as they could to finish out the spring semester, but a range of issues, including grading and online class accessibility, came to the forefront of the student conversations. College Presidents were asked to advocate for their peers to the administration in order to ensure the semester’s results were equitable for students who might not have a suitable learning environment at home.
Looking forward to the fall semester, the residential college presidents worked through the summer to try to develop a plan for how the semester ahead could work, serving on Dean’s Committees to provide a student perspective. Lauren admits that the work over the summer was incredibly time-consuming.
However, that hard work seems to have paid off. “This semester, we were able to come back with much more intention and goals and time to breathe a little bit.” With more time to plan, leaders across the university were able to approach the semester with a new mindset and understanding of how they could move forward: “We have all these rules, and there’s a lot we don’t know, but at least have some kind of framework in which to operate in this space.”
The good news, according to Lauren, is that Rice students “embraced the new rules” and held each other accountable to following covid guidelines. And so far, it seems to be working relatively well. Rice tests community members twice per week, conducting more than 33,ooo tests on campus since August, and has only had36 positive cases since then. This positivity rate of 0.1% is 47 times lower than the National average (4.7% as of October 6, 2020).
In the world before COVID-19, each college’s Commons — their largest indoor gathering space — was a center for meetings, events, and meals. When I lived off campus during my sophomore year, I thought of the Wiess commons as my “home base” — where I’d go between classes, where I’d go to study, and where I’d often spend hours goofing off with friends long into the night. I could spend the whole day in the Commons, moving between tables to chat and study with different peers, and never find myself bored. This year, however, Lauren says that the commons are understandably empty.
With that, Lauren notes that the “in your face community” of the residential colleges is much harder to see: “It’s hard to have those opportunities to just get talking to somebody, you know, during lunch, and then like hanging out in the Commons all day and end up eating dinner together.” Now, she shares, “Those kinds of things — everything — has to be very scheduled”
“Things that have just complicated our ability to just throw something together really quick and bring people to campus and like to hang out,” Lauren shares. With event planning and trying to bring the community together, the measurements of success are also entirely different than they were before: “It’s like, ‘Oh, if this event doesn’t go well, it’s not that people just don’t have fun. It’s that we end up with a COVID outbreak on campus.” She elaborates, “That’s kind of how the stakes feel, which is intense.”
Lauren and other student leaders are now setting their sights ahead to the spring semester, thinking about how they can alter the key events in the spring that are important to Rice culture, like Beer Bike and the related festivities, to adhere to the new rules. They know that the events will not be the same as they were in the past, but with significant planning, “These really hallmark events can still happen in person in a way that’s meaningful.”
COLLEGE SHAPING IDENTITY
Knowing that Lauren is a senior, I ask her to reflect on her college experience and how it has prepared her for the journey ahead.
Lauren notes that there was something special about the people at Rice. Lauren transferred to Rice from Lafayette College at the beginning of her sophomore year. “In transferring, I noticed a big difference in the student body and how much they were doing things because they love them,” she recalls. “When you’re in a class, like a high level like policy class… the students in the class are talking about stuff they’ve published in that field or all the work they’ve done already through internships or research opportunities in that field.”
“That has been, I think, very motivating to me to really think about what I want to do and why I want to do it and really look at what it means to do this work, as opposed to just like being like, ‘I guess I majored in it.’” She continues, “And it’s interesting, having actually talked to people who are already doing it and involved in it and take it very seriously.”
I can definitely attest to the special culture at Rice, having experienced it myself as well. The students’ passion for their work is infectious, and even now as I have been in the “adult world” for more than two years, I haven’t been able to find a community that parallels it. For myself and many other Rice alumni, I think we all try to bring some of our favorite elements of the Rice community to the communities we enter in our adult lives — to varying degrees of success.
Going all in on community
Lauren came into Rice not expecting to care for the residential college system. She remarks, “I didn’t realize it was going to very seriously define my experience. And I also didn’t expect to be the kind of person that embraced it wholeheartedly.”
She continues, “I think that just developing and learning what it means to really be part of a community and feel like a Wiessman and all of that has been very important to like my development as a person.”
Beyond being a community member, leading the community has been an especially powerful experience: “Getting to see myself become a leader and somebody that people told to run for president has kind of empowered me to like seek those experiences elsewhere.” Lauren now hopes to pursue a job in the non-profit policy analysis world after she graduates, with a particular interest in education policy.
However, she isn’t just interested in leadership for leadership’s sake. “It really does start with loving the community you’re part of and that is really, at least in my experience, the prerequisite,” she explains. Her motivations for being a leader come from wanting to pay her experiences forward: “I love Wiess, and I want this to be the positive experience that it’s been for me for everyone.”
Before this experience, she would sometimes feel imposter syndrome when pursuing opportunities, not feeling qualified to pursue her interests. Now, she remarks, she had learned to empower herself: “ I think there is — it sounds cliché — a lot of power in really wanting to do something and just caring to figure out how to make it work.”
This is a major lesson she’ll take with her from college. If you are passionate about a community, “you don’t have to have a certain skill set or background to necessarily serve that community.”
MOVING FORWARD WITH WHOLEHEARTEDNESS
When I ask about mentorship, Lauren explains that she is often inspired by people with a certain quality: “I think Brene Brown calls it like wholeheartedness. People who just approach life from a good place.”
Rather than looking up to people based on their position or status, Lauren notes, “I’ve always been more drawn to just like people who have found a way to approach life in a wholehearted, positive way.”
One example of a wholehearted mentor in her life is her cousin, who has always been inspiring in her resilience. “She’s just somebody that I’ve really always looked up to in terms of how she has used her experience,” Lauren shares. Lauren has watched her cousin “build perspective and really just become a very thoughtful and wonderful person. She’s had her own hardships and stuff, and I think that coming from the same family, that’s easy to relate to — just seeing her always gave me a sense of security.”
Media Recommendations
As for media recommendations, Lauren has been listening to Nice White Parents, a recent podcast from The New York Times, and she has really enjoyed the chance to learn about education policy through a new lens.
On a less serious note, Lauren has also become a big fan of Animal Crossing throughout the pandemic, citing it as a source of “escapism.” In times like these where stress is high, finding a way to decompress is key.
Another source of escapism? HGTV’s Fixer Upper. One day, we may find that Lauren has her own career fixing up houses in addition to fixing up the American education system.
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