An Academic Pandemic - The Perils, Pitfalls, Pedagogy and WTAF moments of working in a Uni during Covid!

[Stillinbedat10am]

Off the back of another thread, here is a space for all staff at UK universities to chat about how life is at the moment.

I work in student welfare at a small post-92 institution who do a lot of work around widening participation. I spent last week coordinating our Freshers' activity and so far the first three days of this week delivering lost students to their correct teaching rooms, sending students back home who had turned up for lectures that are actually being delivered online, managing a group of current students who are working as the Freshers' Welcome Team and then most of this afternoon going back through last weeks registers from Welcome sessions to contact trace.

I am on my knees with exhaustion right now and I don't know how much longer I can keep this up!

On the plus side, the team of student helpers have been fantastic and if I could I would give every one of them a payrise.

How's life for everyone else?

Just clicked on the thread about no's of positive student cases rather hesitantly as I'm so upset about all the negative press on unis at the moment. Really pleased to see this thread as I really feel we need a sounding board for uni staff at the moment. I work in professional services and am at breaking point after 5 solid months of supporting students through this crisis and moving all our services online (what should have been about 2 years work and training covered in a few months for our whole team)

The mental health of my team is pretty poor going into this new academic year - a recruitment freeze has led to missing posts and huge workloads for everyone else. Most of us haven't been able to take any leave at all over the summer. Not a positive start to a challenging year ahead

I work at a large Uni in student welfare, us staff are on our knees trying to keep the students safe and happy. Management keep changing procedures and we are stuck in the middle. Difficult as most freshers events are online. I feel feel these young people... But cases are increasing due to lack of mask wearing/social distancing. Lots and lots of parties in the Halls despite them knowing the risks. The flip side is taking a lot of calls from parents worried their kids are isolated, we can only reassure them and empathise when they are so worried. Us staff are just waiting to get Covid sadly.

@PandaAttack I know exactly what you mean when you say "us staff are just waiting to get Covid." I have found that over the last two weeks I have developed a somewhat fatalistic attitude to it and now feel that it is a case of "when" rather than "if."

Summer was exhausting. We have a lot of care leavers who couldn't leave hall because they have literally nowhere else to call home! A lot of them already struggle and we had a lot of mental health issues, as well as practicalities such as care packages to deal with. I just felt never-ending.

I really feel for the youngsters but so far they seem to be taking it well and are generally in high spirits. I think that isolation is something of a novelty at the moment but I do wonder how they will cope when it inevitably happens repeatedly. We are up to 5 confirmed cases so far and my (highly unprofessional and extremely unpopular) view is that it would almost be better if it just rips through halls now and then we can get on with things.

March was painful too. We are a nursing uni and had 100's out on placement when this all kicked off. The numbers isolating were huge but I am comforting myself with the thought that in the next couple of years we will be turning out the most resilient nurses that the UK has ever seen.

Freshers' was weird this year. It had a bit of a conveyor belt feel to it where we were just aiming to get them onto campus, Welcome them and get them off again with minimal excitement. There was no real atmosphere to it and opportunities to socialise have been almost non-existent. I suspect our drop-our rate will be high this year.

@Stillinbedat10am will every uni have care leavers with nowhere to go. I would love to help - is there anything I can do to support this locally do you know.

Husband works on admissions. He's been WFH since march and horrendously busy with everything that's been happening

I'm a University safety adviser, the only one at my institution. Been working non stop since March (a busy job made busier by Covid) and I have the unenviable task of being expected to know all the answers. I'm burnt out, exhausted, its never ending and everyone is looking for someone to blame. There's job freezes, redundancies, we've had it all this year. Everyone is doing their best I should add. The staff are fab, the students are fab, its just a horrible situation to be in.

I work 1 day a week at a university. My subject can only be taught face to face, although we wear hospital grade PPE at all times.
I am nervous about it. I want to know at what level of infection locally or within the Uni we’ll end face to face or are we carrying on regardless no matter what?

I work in student welfare, I started the thread on the outbreaks.

We too are overwhelmed with students welfare and mental health concerns. The decision to bring students back to campus was a disaster.

Admin team manager in a department. Helping get the teaching online with the various platforms has been an absolute nightmare. Far too many meetings. I think I might have lost 3 days leave due to not being able to take it before the new leave year started, HR look like they've just carried over the normally allowed 5 despite orders from above. Knackered, basically, induction was this week and our numbers are through the roof, which in itself will lead to support issues. Aaaaargh.

That felt better, thanks for the venting space. And all those threads about how we have all been lying and sitting our arses all summer are making me furious.

Survived another day! We are now up to 5 confirmed cases and counting and I have acquired the dubious title of "self-isolation manager." In practice this means I will be managing the database, manning the "help me" inbox and contacting students who need to isolate to give them the bad news. I am concerned that we are not supporting them as well as we could be once they are in isolation so I will be looking at what I can do about this. It just feels like it is never going to end at the moment and I am struggling to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

One of our course groups has had to go entirely online today due to isolating lecturers, but lots of students still turned up on-campus because they are not checking their timetables regularly. I don't know how many more ways we can attempt to drive home the message that things are liable to change at short notice and they need to be checking daily for the most up-to-date info.

@googlepoodle the situation with care leavers will vary from institution to institution. I would suggest that if the uni nearest you has a chaplaincy service they may be a good starting place to make any offers of help. In most unis Chaplaincy is not a role centered around religion, more a general "sweeper up of problems nobody else knows how to deal with" role that happens to be undertaken by a forward-thinking person with religious beliefs. They tend to know about everything welfare-related that goes on.

@murasaki the government stated a while ago that a maximum of 10 leave days can be rolled over, so you shouldn't be losing any days. Definitely query that.

We are constantly being reminded to book leave for our own health and wellbeing, but end up having to either work while on leave or coming back to an absolute shitshow if we don't.

We're in a hotspot city with multiple universities. I'm research staff and DH is senior academic.

Our university insisted on delivering at least some F2F teaching, and last week alone I've heard of two colleagues now having to self-isolate because they were in close contact with students who have now tested positive. So that's going well

DH has only had to lecture online, however he has been assigned a few final year project students who are supposed to be doing practical lab projects.

This is hugely problematic because we've been restricted to very very low occupancy in the research labs, so for each occasion that a project student and their instructor is in the lab at any time, that's 2 postdocs or PhD students who are excluded. And of course, postdocs and PhD students are themselves up against time limits for funding and so on.

Furthermore there's the problem that it's basically impossible to instruct somebody on practical laboratory research whilst socially distanced - understandably, most team leaders have been very reluctant to instruct their research staff to risk their own health and safety in taking on the instruction of a project student. Which then understandably makes the students unhappy.

Basically it's a circular firing squad 😣

Thanks for starting the thread. I'm in libraries at a post-92 institution. Not as hard a job as many of yours, but it's still exhausting. So many of us have been going flat-out for so long and are exhausted, yet there is still so much to do.

However. I'm incredibly proud of our staff and those in every department who have worked incredibly hard to make this work. We have a very restricted number of students coming into the libraries now (while we also try to get across that most of our resources are available to them online) and it's good to see those students quietly working away. The place is the cleanest I've ever seen it, Estates have sent us a massive document detailing what they've done with ventilation, students are given plenty of space to social distance in the library and in the limited FTF lectures, and I've written risk assessments til they're coming out my ears. Everyone is doing their best and we just want to see our students working in safety to get their degrees.

Some students verbally abusing staff over the "ridiculous" guidelines but we are keeping our spirits up as best we can. And stress eating...

I work in a university as a PA, it feels like we haven't stopped since March. Students at the start were pretty rude, some of the emails I saw were dreadful, student's blaming us for the government's lack of decisions. Over the summer I've been sitting in several meetings on student complaints and student's who want refunds on fees. It feels like I have spent the summer in meetings.

I've not a had any proper time off since Christmas and even the days off I have taken I've ended up checking my emails, I'm working from home but will start going in one day a week from next week. I'm not looking forward to it. I've been told the "buzz" isn't there and it's pretty grim. I do miss the office but I've enjoyed working from home with my two four legged feline PAs.

Circular firing squad is the most perfect description of the current situation in academia that I've ever read.

Academic in a RG uni here. Just taken over as postgrad director and braced for arrival of PGTs from this weekend onwards. Drowning. Meanwhile colleagues are crowing about how much writing they got done over lockdown. Hard not to be bitter.

The workload has fallen so, so unequally over the last 6 months. I've been at home with 3 kids and a baby, doing a full time job, and it seems that a few colleagues have spent the time carefully shuffling parts of their workload onto other people whilst no-one's watching. A lot of my colleagues (women) in my position are just simmering with rage all the time... things feel very unfair.

We have close to 100 COVID cases already and many of the students aren't on campus yet. I do my first lot of face-to-face teaching on Tuesday. Fun times! Sending solidarity to everyone that is struggling.

Thank you for this thread, glad to hear from others in the same boat. I work in a college student centre where we are now open after working at home since March. We are in bubbles, some in one day a week others two. We seem to be drowning in work, more and more is getting piled on us, the international office has closed and we've taken that on, the well-being team are still mostly working from home, we are opening till 7pm, many of the staff are at breaking point. This week I must have seen over 50 students!!