I had switched research groups in March and was still on the probation period in the new group when we received the news that the labs will be shut down for an unknown time period. I was not much concerned about progress towards my degree, as I am not close to graduation. But those who were about to graduate or were finishing work for theses were certainly affected.
Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic had a huge destructive effect on all aspects of life. As an international student in these circumstances, I got worried about my family back home, health safety around, research for my PhD degree and the economy of both the USA and my home country. Summer of 2020 caught me with these things in mind.
Research supervisors can be different, but I consider myself extremely lucky with the one that I have. Not only he is great in communicating with students, but also he is not constrained to experimental physics only. All experimental research work experienced a huge hit by the quarantine measures, but my supervisor has many ideas and pre-work done for theoretical studies. And here we all were, picking up suggested projects or finishing previous papers and working on them from home. Funny enough is that I am writing this on the next day after I submitted one of the papers we prepared for publication. A fight with the referees is ahead.
While working on these projects, I found an additional thing for myself to do. Despite experimental physics being my main research direction, I have been interested in making simulations and mathematical modeling for complex systems for quite a while. So, while scientists were trying to convince everyone about measures to “flatten the curve”, I wrote my own simulation for this process. Although a model is quite simple and considers just a certain number of objects (some being initially infected) randomly moving on a 2D plane of certain size, I indeed saw that social distancing helps to prevent fast virus spread even in such an elementary setup. I don’t show the actual data I obtained, but here you can see green paths of objects (people) moving around the city area painted in blue with red areas being infected. I even considered preparing a small paper with my results, but decided that there are enough speculations and arguments around.
One might wonder how I dealt with the anxieties I mentioned above. Moreover, it can be surprising how one can spend time on modeling something such terrifying as virus spreading. Well, scientific curiosity… Other than that, I was spending time on my actual research and was trying to put my mind away from what was happening around by doing my hobbies such as reading. Also, regular short walks (while keeping social distance and wearing masks, obviously) helped not to feel like being put into some Swedish jail (check photos online, they actually look nice).
Fortunately, labs opened at some point in June and we started to resurrect the lab. In some sense, we are still doing that, it is not an easy task (check out a photo of the setup I am working at, surrounded by Christmas lights). Every time I enter the physics department building, my temperature is checked, I get a sticker that says my temperature is checked on that day and I can finally go to the lab. There I disinfect all I need based on the safety protocol. Wearing a mask and gloves are required all the time, by the way. And the same disinfection needs to be done before I leave. We live during strange times indeed.
Written by Alisher Duspayev
Summer Orientation Peer Advisor
Graduate Student
Kazakhstan
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