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The University’s ongoing efforts to control the Coronavirus have transformed the student experience

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this fall semester looked like no other before. Most classes were hosted on Zoom or conducted with an in-person hybrid approach, and students were deprived of the social aspects of collegiate life.

The administration’s response to the pandemic started in the spring when the first case appeared on campus. An employee who was in the Center for Community tested positive for COVID-19, and in response, the next day, March 13, 2020, all classes were moved online.

Interim Dean Keith Molenaar spoke to the Colorado Engineer on the University’s approach to COVID-19, “The university has been leading with science since the very beginning”, Dean Molenaar said, “We led the city, the county, and the state on isolating and addressing the COVID issue. We closed down before the K-12 schools closed down and [before] a lot of the businesses closed down…our epidemiologists understood what was going on and we got the best advice, and I think [we] made the call for safety early.”

This sudden shutdown in March required all of the teaching faculty to quickly embrace remote-teaching and take a “learn-as-you-go” approach.

“The dedication of the faculty to re-develop their classes and think innovatively about hybrid learning took a lot of preparation over the summer. We had working groups that met every week, we had recorded best practices, we tried to all change platforms”, said Molenaar. 

In order to reintroduce people to campus, the University first brought back a limited number of research faculty and students. “To test how we would come back to a full campus, we first brought back the researchers…and to be honest, a few researchers never left”, said Molenaar. This type of research that never left campus included COVID-related research and other critical projects, such as experiments that needed to go to the International Space Station. Molenaar continued, “But then we gradually brought [more] people back, and we went through a rigorous safety PPE  protocol process.” The University slowly re-introduced more research faculty and students who needed to complete research to graduate or meet important deadlines. All of this careful experimentation in the summer helped develop safety procedures that were then implemented in the fall.

 The University of Colorado invested millions of dollars into facilities management and testing capabilities. 

This included thorough cleaning of buildings, installing HEPA filters in classrooms that were utilized for in-person learning, and putting up tents that served as outdoor workplaces for students. These tents had tables, chairs, power and wifi to provide students and faculty places to work on campus. Molenaar considers all these efforts implemented on campus a success, citing contact tracing efforts that show that at the time of our discussion, “there has been no community transmission [of COVID] through the classroom setting.”

In addition to altering workplaces on campus, the University welcomed students back to campus housing. This required all students to get tested prior to move-in and mandated weekly screening tests to students that lived in campus housing. On-campus isolation spaces were also created for students that tested positive and needed to quarantine. 

While the university invested a lot of time and money to mitigate COVID spread, there was still substantial spread throughout the student body. By mid-September, hundreds of on-campus students tested positive for COVID-19, leading to a Boulder County Public Health order that forbade gatherings for those between the ages of 18 and 22 from Sept. 24 to Oct. 8.

“I’ll be honest, the one place we missed it was on the social side. I think from the scientific and engineering side, we really did a great job of making [campus] a safe place [including] the ‘Protect Our Herd’ campaign [and] the social distancing, but two things kind of lead to the spike” said Molenaar. Unforeseen community spread occurred during sorority and fraternity ‘rush’ as well as the Labor Day weekend, where discouraged social gatherings lead to more coronavirus transmission.

Aerospace Engineering graduate student, Esther Putman, spoke to the Colorado Engineer about her experience conducting human-subject testing for her master’s research during this global pandemic, “We’re working really hard to keep everyone safe, but we’re also trying to keep things going at the same pace as it normally does.”

According to Putman, “We have to do a lot of checklists to be on campus, we have to fill out forms and we have a lot of procedures. I think the thing that has been hardest for our lab is that each room has a person limit that is more-or-less made by the square footage of the room. My lab has a three-person limit, but in order to test I have to have a subject, me and an operator in the room. So if we’re testing, no one else can be in the room, which is a limitation for training or troubleshooting.”

Putman noted, “I think the great thing to see is that everyone has banded together to try to create the best system possible for allowing things to keep moving forward. My deadlines haven’t changed, so it’s truly been a collaboration to get this work done.”

The Colorado Engineer also spoke with Aerospace Engineering freshman, Sasha Gladkova, to hear about her experience of living on-campus and starting her collegiate career in the midst of COVID-19.

“I was very close to making the decision to stay at home, and then I thought, ‘What am I going to be doing with my life for a year?’ It also became clear that Coronavirus wasn’t going to go away anytime soon,” Gladkova said. “The experience we’re having now is not the typical freshman experience or what most people want, but all of us are doing it together...there is a lot of stuff we’re missing out on, but also I think we’re a very special group of freshmen this year cause I don’t think we would’ve made the relationships we did if we had normal circumstances.”

In order to mitigate contagion during peak travel days, the University announced over the summer that it would shorten the Thanksgiving break and would move all courses to remote learning after the break for the remainder of the semester. This shift to online learning was then moved forward to Nov. 16 in response to the state of Colorado’s elevated COVID outbreak.

Similarly, the Spring 2021 semester was adjusted in order to prevent travel-related COVID-19 infections. The spring semester will continue with a mix of in-person, remote and hybrid courses, but it will not have a Spring Break. Instead, the semester will start on Thursday, Jan. 14, and will have two ‘wellness days’ on Wednesday, Feb. 17 and Thursday, March 25.

The College of Engineering and Applied Science also announced that all applications to their graduate programs this fall will not require Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

At the end of our discussion with Molenaar, he said, “I’ve been a student or a faculty member on-and-off since 1987 here, and this year is unlike any I have ever seen. The engineers are leading campus through both scientifically reacting and socially reacting. I like [the Colorado Engineer’s theme of] perseverance, but I like resilience because our students are resilient. They get knocked down and they just get back up again. Being at CU this long, I think this year’s class will be the strongest class that we’ve ever put into the engineering workforce.”

Molenaar concluded saying, “I know the isolation is tough but I think students will have a closer bond with each other than they ever have before. I truly believe this year will create a group of engineers that will be our best ever.”