With the world moving online, the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies revamped the process for thesis defense announcements and thesis submission, and students and thesis committees quickly moved to an online defense process. Defenses are moving forward as while our scholars are maintaining the social distancing recommended by the Centers for Disease Control.
Newly minted doctor Anna Babushkina of BioSciences was the first at Rice to present her thesis to a partially remote committee due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
“It was a lot at first,” she said. “Everything happened in such a short timespan. My defense was happening early Monday, and I think the first time I had heard of Zoom was Friday afternoon.”
Facing the unknown and making a mental adjustment to the new method, she said, was the hardest part, but her fears about the technology quickly dissolved. “It was easy! Zoom was not that hard to figure out,” she said.
Edward Valentin of History defended his thesis entirely remotely, and said the process was very smooth. Valentin, Babushkina, and graduate program administrators Lydia Westbrook and Rachael Eaton below give their advice for getting ready for Zoom defenses, both from the student and administrative perspective.
