The Mentor Minute with Professor Erin Cram: Taking the Fear Out of Office Hours

In this new feature, we’ll be interviewing faculty members and mentors about some of the questions that have surfaced during our and their work mentoring and advising students in research and creative endeavor. For our first edition, we spoke to Erin Cram, Professor of Biology and Associate Dean of Research in the College of Science. Cram is a Faculty Fellow of the URF office and an award-winning research scientist and mentor.

For our brief interview, our office’s Associate Director, Jennifer Lieb, asked Cram about the strategies she has used — and is looking to use — to build strong relationships with students.  Here’s what she had to say.

URF: Before the pandemic, how were you building mentorship relationships with students?

EC: One way I got to know undergraduates before COVID was through the Undergraduate Research and Fellowship office. As a faculty fellow of the University Scholars Program and then the URF, that’s been a really great opportunity for me to have real conversations with undergraduates by attending events, hanging out, and advising. And, of course, students also hang out with me after class and chat or attend my office hours. I have had quite a few undergrads working in my research lab as well. Before COVID, I’d say those were the main ways.

Of course, with COVID everything went virtual. I have a number of students doing virtual research projects and we had virtual events and conversations. But it is true that it was really different. It’s harder for people to connect initially, I think. For me, it was easy to maintain relationships I already had with students, but developing a kind of rapport and trust is a little harder over Zoom, I think. We did our best I thought—some of our interactions were actually quite good.

URF: Could you tell us more about strategies that you have adopted to help students build meaningful connections with you during the pandemic? 

EC: For the courses that I taught, I had drop-in problem-solving hours on Zoom in which we would work on problems together. I found calling them problem-solving hours made them much more popular than calling them my office hours. I actually had a lot more people attending my drop-in problem-solving hours than I did attending my office hours pre-COVID, where I often sat by myself and did my work. That was very effective, and I also had a Zoom coffee hour that was pretty fun—just half an hour or so to chat.

In my course, I also had a get-to-know-you discussion board where all the students introduced themselves and I replied to all of them to try to make at least some connection with people who I would just know virtually. I think that helped a little bit.

URF: How did exactly did the problem-solving sessions work? They sound really interesting. To what extent were you observing the students trying to work through problems as opposed to leading the discussion yourself?

EC: Well, it depends how stuck people are. I would try to use kind of a Socratic method to guide people through how to solve the problems. I have a tablet, so I would be able to write on my iPad tablet to work out or draw a sketch of what the workflow would be for a specific experiment or something like that. We talked about, say, a solved version of it looking at a figure that was similar to the task, saying, all right, what do we need to know to understand this figure? What don’t you understand about this figure? How can we apply this to the problem that’s at hand? It was kind of a back-and-forth I’d say, but if we started to run out of time I’d just solve the problem—which I don’t think is the best. The best is the guiding.

URF: How big were the groups? Did you try to restrict the number at all, or was it just whoever turned up?

EC: Whoever turned up, and that’s the beauty of Zoom actually. I mean you see my office here—three people fit in here pre-COVID, so it’s nice to be able to accommodate. We would have, depending on how close we were to the tests, between five and twenty-five people.

URF: How effective do you think the problem-solving sessions and your other strategies have been thus far?

EC: The problem-solving sessions are pretty good. I think they’re better than regular office hours. I mean, how effective either of those things is, I’m not sure. I think they’re effective for helping students learn the material; I don’t know how effective they are for building a relationship between a professor and a student. Those are two goals—they’re not completely different, they’re sort of overlapping goals, because getting to know somebody helps you learn and helps you develop and helps you move on to the next stage in your career. As far as the class goes, I thought it worked fine.

Yet, as far as being able to write somebody a great recommendation letter, it’s not as good. For the recommendation letters, I do one-on-one interviews, a chatty half-hour interview with the student to try to get a feel for them a little bit better.

URF: How well do you think the discussion board posts played out? What were you asking them to post on, and do you think that helped give you a little more insight into the students?

EC: I gave them a little example bio, so they would see mine and see what I was looking for. Then I had a separate questionnaire with a set of questions about their previous co-op experiences, previous research experiences. There was kind of a trick to get them to read the syllabus, a question about what they expected to get out of the class and how it matched what was in the syllabus or where it differed. It was very useful because I could see, oh, this student wants to go to graduate school, so I can target emails to that person, and this person is going to med school. This person has this co-op experience, maybe I’ll include some of that research in the course. That worked well. This is actually Wendy Smith’s idea, by the way. We were doing it pre-COVID and kept doing it. I think it’s a really good way both to get the class to think about what they want to get out of a class and to know what their background is.

URF: How about your interactions with your lab students? How happy are you with how those have played out over the course of COVID?

EC: The ones I already knew, it was fine. We did not really take on very many students during COVID. That’s a little bit of a shame. The lab has gotten kind of small, but now we’re looking forward to ramp it back up, of course.

It’s much harder with people you don’t already know. I didn’t find it that satisfactory.

URF: What do you plan to make a permanent part of your practice as an educator when we’re able to go back in person?

EC: I’m definitely keeping those Zoom office hours/problem-solving sessions, those are great. If I can, I’ll keep them on Zoom. I think it’s better.

Then I have in-person office hours by appointment, and then we have coffee hour too. It should be enough time.

URF: Will the coffee hour be over Zoom?

EC: That’s what we were doing. It’ll be interesting to see if we can do it, we might be able to do it hybrid or in person, I’m not sure.

They’re both office hours—it’s just trying to make it friendlier and more useful-sounding.

I’ll keep the intro questionnaire, too. I think that works really well. And, before COVID, I never recorded my lectures. I always record them now, and I think it’s good, because I was finding that it was useful for people that perhaps didn’t have English as a first language or sometimes I just go too fast, or students have a bad day and they zone out. They have a chance again to see the material.

The reason I didn’t do it before—well, there’s really two reasons. I was worried that I would look ridiculous giving lectures, but I’m past that. It might be true, but I don’t care. And I was worried people wouldn’t come to class and they wouldn’t participate, but I find that people on Zoom do participate. Not everyone, but… I have audience response polls all the time and put questions in the chat. I find actually with the audience response—I use Polls Everywhere—but I find the participation better on Zoom than I did in class. So it is possible. I’m planning to keep both things.

URF: Is there anything else, in terms of observations you have about the experience of teaching during the pandemic and building relationships with students, that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to elaborate on now?

EC: Well, one of the things I really like about the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, especially through the PEAK Awards program, is the chance I’ve gotten to talk to students from different disciplines. Together in the same conversation, we might have somebody from design and somebody from psychology and somebody from languages and somebody from sciences, and we’re all talking about the research we’re doing and what we’re doing and then we’re all learning from each other. We’re learning to think about things from different angles and to see things in different ways. I think I’ve learned as much as anyone else. It has been really enjoyable. I like that, and I think that’s something that we didn’t have as much before. You know, I tended to interact with biology majors. Maybe bio-engineering if I went out on a limb! It’s not always true, of course, with the University Scholars I interacted with lots of different kinds of people, but people would come to me for, you know, biology grad school advice or med school advice, not “let’s talk about this painting.”

So I really enjoyed that and that was a way to get to know people I think on a little bit of a different level.

URF: I think that’s what I’ve got in terms of questions. Thank you so much for doing this.

EC: You’re welcome.