When the Pandemic Upended Global Travel, Students Canceled Trips and Pivoted to Remote Teamwork

Some faculty members said IQP activities overseas have always required flexibility. Even during the best of times, projects sometimes encounter roadblocks and must be changed.

Global Lab co-director Stephen McCauley, who is also an assistant teaching professor in Interdisciplinary and Global Studies and co-director of the Melbourne Project Center in Australia, said he expects there will be lessons in resilience for IQP teams this term.

“We'll also work with students on fostering initiative and creativity,” McCauley wrote in an email. “The best projects are always ones where students take the project in new directions, and that will be especially welcomed this term.”

Delivering on projects for sponsors remains a key goal of this term’s IQPs, said Sarah Stanlick, assistant professor of Interdisciplinary and Global Studies, who had been scheduled to accompany six student teams to Berlin. In addition, she hopes students learn that the world is moving toward more virtual work. Succeeding with these projects will be an asset for students when they leave WPI and seek jobs, Stanlick said.

“The students have more capacity to be resilient than they probably realize,” Stanlick said. “Working under an emergency situation and pivoting, that is a great lesson to learn.”

When Teams Change Course

Still, some projects did not go forward as planned because of time differences, limitations at sponsors’ sites, and the inability to conduct in-person interviews. Some students also chose to leave their teams to pursue other IQP options.

Of the five teams that had been scheduled to go to the Paraguay Project Center, three continue to work on projects about waste management, erosion control on the campus of agriculture and vocational school Escuela Agricola, and saving and budgeting among the rural poor in Cerrito.  Groundwork is being done by Paraguayans, although they are sheltering in their homes, too, said Robert Traver, project center director and teaching professor in International and Global Studies.

Two teams working on wetlands conservation and scientific problem solving in Paraguay dissolved, and the students scattered to other options.

“Following a little reassignment of the two remaining members of the problem-solving team and a repurposing of the wetland conservation team, a new team was created called the Town of Harvard (MA) Agricultural Practices Climate Resilience Study,” Traver wrote in an email. “That team works with the town of Harvard’s Agricultural Advisory Commission and the town’s Climate Resilience Working Group, a committee formed to develop and execute the town Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness plan (Vulnerability to Climate Change).”

In response to the reconfiguring of teams, history professor Peter Hansen worked with other faculty members to quickly come up with a new theme for students who needed to pivot to something different: collecting, compiling, and analyzing stories from the pandemic. The theme was modeled after Shockey’s previous efforts with students to collect climate change stories from around the world.

Everyone Has a Story About the Pandemic

Perez was among the students who signed on. She and two other students had planned to study ecotourism impacts and opportunities in Mandi, India. When that became untenable, her team disbanded to pursue other projects separately. Perez and one teammate linked up with three new teammates, and the group decided to interview individuals about the pandemic, collect stories, and create an archive.

Perez, who connects virtually with her teammates from her Worcester apartment, said she still hopes to weave cross-cultural collaborations into her project and has come to feel that the project has more global connections than the one she originally pursued.

“Ecotourism isn’t something that’s applicable everywhere in the world,” Perez said. “This project (about the pandemic) is something that every single person in the world has a story about.”

Hansen, who is also director of WPI International and Global Studies and had been scheduled to accompany six student teams to Denmark as an advisor, said he knows it has been tough for students to let go of preparations they had made. But he hopes they will still achieve the goals of the IQP program, which is to work at the intersection of science, technology, and society.

“The thing I always say about WPI students is they’re very smart and they work very hard,” Hansen said. “You can do a lot with people who have those two qualities.”

-By Lisa Eckelbecker