COVID-19 and the Future of Classics Graduate Study

This talk will discuss the challenges and promises of a specific response to graduate student professional uncertainty; namely an optional bridge year out from the PhD into any type of non-teaching job. It will consider not only what's possible from an institutional standpoint, but also grad student perspectives about what kind of support and professional development has been and would be most meaningful to them going forward.

So much of graduate training in Classics focuses on training in research. But in today’s reality, teaching and service take up more and more of both faculty and graduate students’ time. Graduate programs need to reckon with this reality and devise ways to prepare their graduate students for them, especially now as university priorities are shifting.

The COVID crisis pushed many educators from brick and mortar classrooms onto online platforms on short notice and without appropriate support: the difficulties in this transition were partly due to differences in effective pedagogy between the two teaching environments.

Now more than ever, educators must be prepared to face the the challenges of teaching online facing both educators and students for a medium or even long term. Going forward, what are the likely pressure points going to be in this shift, and what we can do to support it as a structure in order to ensure that our students are receiving the best outcomes?

One thing that the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted for graduate students around the world is our liminal position in academia. As students we are expected to continue our studies uninterrupted but as instructors, we are essential workers needed to help keep the university running remotely. And yet, we are expected to do all of this while struggling to make ends meet and no pause on the graduation clock.