Although social distancing requirements led to fewer opportunities to see people in person, the graduate student community stayed vibrant and connected. Before classes went virtual, one of the primary ways that students would keep in touch was through informal conversations in offices and daily teas. While this could not continue in the same manner during the pandemic, shortly into the semester, third year Michael Lane began to host virtual teas twice a week. Running on Zoom and a newly formed departmental Discord server, the teas helped to build a sense of interconnectedness and to provide a place for first-year graduate students to interact with older students in the department.
Beyond this, the Mathematics Graduate Student Association (MGSA) — led by President Ethan Ackelsberg, Vice President Kriti Sehgal and Treasurer Bhawesh Mishra — spearheaded many additional activities to help maintain this sense of community. In addition to holding meetings to discuss student concerns, they continued to host the MGSA seminar series, a forum for graduate students to share their areas of study and connect. They also organized a self-care workshop in conjunction with the Counselling and Consultation Center at Ohio State.
While these events took place in-person before the pandemic and were moved online, some new activities began as well. For the first time, the MGSA fielded teams that took part in biweekly, university-wide trivia nights organized by the Ohio Union Activities Board. Rather than keeping these teams limited to the math department, they consisted of a mix of graduate students in math, statistics and biostats. This provided a new forum to meet students from other departments and will hopefully become a tradition that will last even when in-person activities resume.
