Our guests this week are Redwan Bin Abdul Baten and Rachel Maller, two graduate students at the University of Iowa who both serve on the UI’s Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG). They share their experiences as grad students and talk about the creation and implementation of a survey and report designed to gather information about the many issues and difficulties faced by students during the pandemic. 

Alexis Clark:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the university of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Alexis Clark and I am joined today by Steve Sonnier. If this is your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone, both in and out of the field of public health. Today, we’re delighted to talk with Redwan Bin Abdul Baten, a third year PhD student at the College of Public Health, where he also serves as the Health and Safety Chair of the Graduate and Professional Student Government. We are also joined today by Rachel Maller, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology, where she also serves as the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Chair for the Graduate and Professional Student Government. Welcome to you both.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Thank you.

Rachel Maller:

Thanks.

Steve Sonnier:

Redwan and Rachel, what’s your background prior to coming to the University of Iowa? How did you guys both get introduced to the field of public health and sociology, respectively. Redwan, if you want to start us off.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Sure, sure. Thank you for having us today. My background, briefly, I’m a dentist. My training was back in Bangladesh and after dental school, I worked for the government for three years mostly serving in very, very rural areas, Bangladesh. Of course, we have several problems in that country. We have resource constraints. We have so many other problems. That kind of led me to towards public health, more specifically health policy issues. I did my MPH there and applied to several schools that were focusing on public health and of course, rural health and University of Iowa being one of the hubs of rural health. Then globally, I mean, not many institutions are working on rural health and more specifically our department, the Health Management and Policy Department housed within the College of Public Health, that focuses a lot on rural health. That kind of led me to where I am today.

Steve Sonnier:

Rachel, how about yourself?

Rachel Maller:

Yeah. All right. I’m originally from West Des Moines, Iowa, and I came here for undergrad. While an undergrad, it wasn’t the most easy journey, I will say. I struggled a bit with some mental health challenges. I ended up having to leave a couple of times to deal with that, but ended up coming back and choosing sociology as my major. My mom just encouraged me, “Hey, just graduate college, do sociology. It’s something you love. It’s something you’re good at.” I’m, “Okay, you’re right.” I went back into it and I’m like, “No, you are right. I love this job. This is exactly what I should have done the whole time.”

Rachel Maller:

My last year of undergrad, I was like, “Oh, I’m going to graduate. What do I do?” I found an internship and I ended up getting connected with this woman named Dr. Sarah Brooke at the Public Policy Center. She started this partnership with the Iowa City School District. It’s a research practice partnership. We do school climate surveys and we basically try to leverage social science research to improve educational policy and decision-making. Doing that work, I just fell in love with research. I was like, “This is what I want to do. It’s the way I can apply my skills and the things I’m passionate about to make a difference.” I’m like, “Okay, I want to go to grad school.” I never thought grad school was an option before either, so I thought that was super cool.

Rachel Maller:

I applied to grad school here, got in and I’ve just loved it ever since. I’ve kept working with the Iowa City schools. I’m doing a lot of equity related stuff. My main research interest is in educational inequity, so I look a lot about social relationships within schools and how that’s impacted by inequality and how that reproduces inequality. Things like student-teacher relationships and bullying. Now I’m a Research Assistant at the Center for Evaluation and Assessment and I’m also the DEA chair for GPSG. It’s been a bit of a journey to get to grad school, but it’s been a good one.

Alexis Clark:

Yeah. It’s great to hear that you guys both came from such different backgrounds and have such different interests that you’re able to intertwine those and create something really cool with GPSG. That leads into our next question. What enticed you both to join this organization? Redwan, if you want to answer first, that’d be great.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Well, I was at the beginning of the pandemic and everyone was going through a tough time, including myself. I was working as a TA and RA, both roles that were during that time. I was just seeing how students were freaking out during that time, during the transition towards full online and safety measures on campus. Everyone was so confused and we were getting mixed responses from some of the safety measures being implemented, both on campus and off campus. I mean, it was a confusing time overall. That led me towards applying for GPSG because I thought I could bring in some public health experience, bring in some research skills into serving during that troubled time. I also was doing some research on student health during that time, just looking at some health outcomes of the student population across the United States, mostly because in our department we do secondary data analysis. We use large nationally available data sets, and so I already had done some research on mental health and physical health for the student population, looking at them by undergraduate population, graduate population, and some of the differences that are there.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Also, some health differences between international students and domestic students. I was doing that as a side project, as a personal hobby sort of thing, but then the pandemic happened and GPSG advertised for that. They needed a health and safety chair and I said, “Oh, I’m interested in serving and I’m also interested in turning evidence-based research into policy actions, actionable items.” That’s always been something that I was interested in to learn more deeply. I was taking many courses on health policy and stuff, but this was an opportunity for me to actually exercise those things that I learned in class.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

I thought, “Okay, let’s do this.” Also, it was in the back of my mind that, okay, this pandemic is going to be really difficult and I’m going to be locked up in my house for such a long time. I need something to keep myself going. It’s kind of counterintuitive because I actually applied more pressure on myself by signing up for GPSG. I was working with other organizations as well, but it helped me fill my schedule, otherwise I don’t know what I would have been doing during that time.

Alexis Clark:

Thank you so much for that. Rachel, what about you?

Rachel Maller:

No, I did not perceive that I was going to be stuck at home for a year when I signed up with the position, but it’s okay. It all worked out. What got me interested is GPSG was just the opportunity to be a student leader and be close to where decision making happens. I think due to my experience as an undergrad where I was just not that at all, I felt very much like an outsider, like I didn’t belong and things like that. To come back and be in these rooms, and have his kind of power and influence and in a positive way on campus, and be able to contribute, and make a difference and make it a better place, which is what I wanted as an undergrad, it was just… Not really like a dream, but very cathartic to be able to come back and do a position like this.

Rachel Maller:

Then also along the work I do, similar to Redwan is doing evidence-based practices research and translating that into policy-making, and decision-making and practice. This position also gave me the opportunity to do a lot of equity work using data and surveys, and using that to inform the things that we do moving forward. It was in line with a lot of the professional work I do, which I love doing in a higher education setting, has been very interesting, especially during this year. Oh, my Lord, very interesting and challenging, but rewarding. Then also personally, it was a goal and something that I like to do. Plus, I’m a pretty social person and so it just gives you a bunch of automatic friends and people to connect with, so that was cool too.

Steve Sonnier:

Those are all really good benefits. I think a lot of folks have that an undergrad, where you feel removed from the decision making process as a whole and then coming into graduate school, it’s a little bit more of a small fish in a small pond situation where you can make a splash. That’s excellent that both of you were both involved in this program as a whole. In the crux of the issue, I think that we’re talking about today, is this COVID-19 Graduate and Professional Student Government Survey report that you guys have both been working on. Can you explain a bit to our audience what this report was about? What was it like conducting this report during a pandemic? Give us a little bit more insight into that one.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Again, it was beginning of last summer and we were going through the pandemic and of course this is an unprecedented situation. Nobody has ever faced this kind of situation before, so there was a huge lack of data due to lack of surveys. We were thinking about, okay, this is not really good because without data, without evidence, you can’t really make good decisions. Some of the decisions that were coming from the university administration or off-campus, it was kind of confusing because some people were really okay with those kind of decisions and others were not. Others were really worried about their safety and health situation. We were like, “Okay, we need to fill up this gap of the lack of data and evidence.” That was one more motivation. Also, several other things were happening at the same time. Last summer, it was the international students had some difficulties because of some federal regulations that were not kind of cool.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Then just a few weeks later, racial justice issues were really, really happening all across the United States. That was also on our radar that, okay, this is also happening. Then also other things started happening, political unrest, and then some other issues also came up. All of these things were happening simultaneously and of course, all of this happening under the broader umbrella of the COVID pandemic. We had this idea that, okay, all of this is impacting our students. All of this is impacting us, so we need to capture this in a survey.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

It was intuitively that all of these are impacting mental health and all of these are impacting students in different ways, but we need the evidence. We need to know how they’re doing. As representatives of the Graduate and Professional Students, we felt the responsibility that we need to listen to the people that we are representing, and see what they’re doing and what their issues are. Also, we wanted to see how the students felt about the university’s response to the COVID pandemic and so we had some of those questions in the survey as well. All of these issues, I would say that contributed towards conducting that survey.

Rachel Maller:

Just to add on, it’s sometimes difficult in student government to hear from your constituents all the time, get that kind of feedback that you ideally would like on what should happen. You can reach out to talk to students or students can email you, but doesn’t happen a whole lot with GPSG. The survey was a way for us to gauge the pulse of where everybody’s at and have that to be able to take that back to administrators and advocate for certain things and say, “Hey, well, this is saying people’s mental health sucks, so help,” and things like that, and to help guide us a little bit better as well without the survey would be a great opportunity to get that data for everybody to make some moves.

Alexis Clark:

You mentioned mental health just now. What were the key findings you guys found when researching what the student’s pulse was during during this time?

Rachel Maller:

It’s bad. It’s not completely unexpected. I think we all knew this and as grad students, we can feel it too to some degree. We found that COVID severely impacted students’ mental health. We asked, “How much did it impact your mental health?” I think 89% of students said that it was negatively impacted by COVID. We gauge just how they’re doing, just like, “How is your mental health?” Only 46% of people said it was good, very good or excellent, which means that half the people are not having positive mental health at all. Then we also asked, “What services do you need?” 70% of students said they want more mental health services. This is basically how severe it is, how prevalent it is among students, and how impactful it can be to be struggling with that, and that they feel like they need to have more help and support than is currently being provided by the university or other organizations. Those were some key findings around mental health. Super concerning and sad, not completely unsurprising, but definitely shows you that there’s a lot of work to be done in this area.

Alexis Clark:

With that being said, I know for me personally, coming into grad school during COVID, I don’t know if some of my mental health or my friends’ mental health disservices were due to COVID or just due to the pressure of grad school and it’s not for everyone. How do you guys take grad school being just a difficult beast in itself and with that data due to COVID, how do you guys gauge that?

Rachel Maller:

Yeah, I’ve questioned that too, just on my own. How much of this is COVID stress and grad stress, but I think the intersection of that makes it even more. We also asked, “How stressed do you feel from certain things?” We combined sometimes very often or locked in and it was like 92% are stressed by their workload, 89% are stressed by this. Everyone is very stressed out. I feel that sometimes too. I think that being in grad school, during the COVID pandemic, especially going into your first year, I think about that too, the first years in my program, how you don’t get those same connections, opportunities just to hang around the department, talk to people, go to happy hour, do whatever you want. It takes away a lot of these what we call weak ties, like colleagues and things. I think it’s especially hard for first years.

Rachel Maller:

For graduating students, it sucks too. We have some graduating law students in our government and it sucks for them to just have your last year and be like, “Just go on now.” I think the intersection of being in grad school, it’s already a super stressful situation. It’s a lot of pressure on yourself to work, work, work, produce, produce, get to the next step, but when there’s so much stress going on politically with COVID, with racial justice, it’s a lot. You’re stuck in your room. For some people it’s a lot to comprehend all the stuff going on, but yet you’re alone, so it’s weird. Those are some of my thoughts on it.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Yeah. Those are all great thoughts. I just would like to add a little bit. I am going to sound a little bit like a nerd while answering this. Methodologically, there are ways to tease out these effects, the effects of graduate school, the effects of COVID, effects of racial injustice. There are ways to get these things out, but we need large data sets. We need repeated data sets that will help us pull a lot of data together to do that kind of work. My concern is that nobody’s really doing that as far as I know, making that effort, getting some funding for these kinds of projects because it will require a lot of data to do this, but there are certainly ways to do that. My only concern is there needs to be more efforts in this arena to get a more deeper understanding of what happened during this pandemic.

Steve Sonnier:

The qualitative analysis side of things, Redwan, one thing that stuck out to me, you can appreciate this as a TA and an RA, is the challenges with teaching responsibilities and lack of academic accommodations, right? During the entirety of the pandemic, several universities, including ours, has taken a more difficult approach when it comes to converting classes to an online measure. You’ve got some qualitative findings from the survey saying things like, “I hope classes go 100% online in the spring. As a TA, I feel really unsafe teaching undergrads in an airborne viral pandemic.” When you reflect on your experiences as a TA, and Rachel to yourself too, being part of public health and sociology departments that are supposed to be championing the response to COVID-19 and protecting your students, and you’re seeing where responses like these, what kind of emotions does that invoke as a student and as a professional too?

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

During that time, I was working as a TA. I also worked as a TA last fall as well, and so the safety of my students and safety of myself, those were, of course, top priority. Even if I went to class, for some reason that was unavoidable, I had to go, but I was always worried about myself. I was worried about my students. I was worried about my family back home, that if I get this virus, it’s just not me, it’s my family as well. A lot of things were happening and as I said, governance is tough. Governing is not easy. The response that the university made, a lot of it was very good, but a lot of it was not up to the mark. There were better examples even in other universities in Iowa.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

This is reflected in the students’ evaluation of how the university responded to the pandemic. It was mixed, that students had mixed responses to the university’s response to the overall pandemic and I get it. This is an unprecedented pandemic that no one else has faced before, so you are going to make mistakes, but there could have been more efforts to ensuring that, “Okay, we have… I think yesterday I saw in the email that around a little more than 3,000 students self-reported that they had contracted COVID. We could have avoided a lot of those. These are just self-reported numbers. This is not the full picture, but we could have avoided a lot of those cases if we were more careful, if we implemented proper decisions. You don’t need to be actually tough to be more safe, you can be more pragmatic is what I’m trying to say.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

There were examples all over the US, how campus has dealt with this kind of situation, like testing students before admitting them into the dorms or stuff like that, which could have been done. We had the infrastructure, we had the resources to do that. We felt from student government that we could do that. Our President Mackensie and Vice President Bell. They advocated very strongly for these measures. Somehow, their voices did not get heard at certain levels at certain points in time. That was my experience as well last year.

Rachel Maller:

Yeah, I think the frustrating part was just the students and grad workers voicing their concern and just not being listened to. That was pretty hard for people. I’m also in the Union COGS that we have for RAs and TAs here on campus. They were fighting hard in the beginning to say, “Please put 100% online classes if able to do this.” They were protesting out there to do it. It was like silence. Even in GPS, we advocated, “As much as you can, put things online.” Just all these COVID safety measures and whatnot, but the university does what it does, so love shared governance. It’s great, but it’s difficult in times like this when… It’s really hard to do what the students want, do what’s good for like the university’s stuff. You have to balance so many priorities that sometimes the student stuff gets pushed a little bit down, but I know students were fighting hard to have stuff wanting to be online. You don’t want to see it. It’s sad to see, but it’s almost inspiring that students were still our here fighting for what they believe in.

Steve Sonnier:

The report was published in March of 2021. We focus on the evidence-based policy practices and everything to that effect. Did this report generate specific actions from it? Was it informative for folks? What was the end result? Aside from surveying the students and having this general knowledge which we need to continue to collect, where there end products that came about as a result of the survey?

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

The university is currently in the process of planning for the next semester for summer. They’re planning to go full in-person classes. A lot of turnover in the university administration at the same time, we’re searching for a new president. A lot of positions at the dean level are also being filled right now. It’s a transition phase that the university is going through. This report coming out, we have presented this report to the appropriate levels as best as we could. The people who actually work on health and safety issues across campus, student wellness centers, and every other outfit that deals with student health issues. We have shared this report with them and they are currently looking at that. They’re incorporating these findings into their decision-making. Of course, it’ll take a little bit more time to see some concrete product based off of this report. General feedback is, “This is very useful. Thank you for doing this. This is really helpful. We don’t have this kind of data.”

Alexis Clark:

Looking back now that this survey has been published, what findings did you both find most personally surprising?

Rachel Maller:

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot I found super surprising. We know what’s happening a bit on the ground, and then we both do research in areas around what’s going on. The one I’m perhaps surprised by was the stress from things like workload, the political climate, social isolation, maybe that’s more I felt validation from the [inaudible 00:23:09]. Figured that, “Okay, everyone else is really stressed out too. Okay.” That’s not good, but it makes me feel a little more like validated that I’m not just going crazy here in my house. That one, but it was still high, like 91%. It was kind of sad to see everyone being that stressed out over things.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

As I mentioned before in the discussion that the university’s response and how the students felt about that response, it’s kind of mixed. Seeing that kind of evidence, part of me was reassuring that, okay, I’m not the only one taking this in the wrong way or something like that, but a lot of people had mixed responses. If we break it down by graduate and undergraduate status, that would also play into this, but that was one of the things that was striking for me.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Another thing was we tried to address some disparity issues, at least try to find some disparity issues by breaking the results down by race and by gender. Of course, we had a small sample size for different racial groups, non-white racial groups, but still, in some of the categories, like all of the black students reported that they had certain problems, which was concerning. That even if the sample size is small, but 100% of them are saying that they have resource problems, or they have been negatively impacted by some issue. That was striking for me that, okay, all members of this group are saying that they have this issue. These are some of the things that we intended to tease out. Of course, the university needs to work more with these specific groups and to try to better understand what the issues are and how the university can help resolve those disparities.

Steve Sonnier:

Talk about the challenging and rewarding aspects of this in-depth survey. I was looking over the figures for it and you’ve got a relatively really good response rate of about 838 folks responding overall, which is fantastic since you’ve got that really diverse perspective set. When you’re looking through and going through this process as a whole, what is most challenging for it when you’re going through it, then what’s most rewarding for you guys in creating this survey?

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

We did this in a way that was multi-disciplinary. We had a multidisciplinary team in place to conduct a survey. We invited friends, of course. If we advertised it in a formal way, that would have taken a longer time. We invited people that we knew had [inaudible 00:25:55] skills or that kind of training to conduct service or who had… In graduate professional student population, you have a certain advantage that some students are really experienced. They have worked in the field for a certain number of years, and then they came back to get their PhD or something like that. There were people like that in our team as well, really mature people who had actually experience to do this kind of work. It was surprising that we have these resources and nobody was asking us to do anything. We just felt that we need to involve more people so that they can actually exercise their expertise here. This is a pandemic situation. We need all hands on deck kind of situation.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

We brought in a long list of people who were from different departments, from different backgrounds. Each of them brought in wonderful perspectives and skillsets to the table. We had people like Rachel from sociology, who also deals with the EI issues and other issues. We had other people who were skilled in qualitative data analysis and some people who were skilled in quantitative data analysis. We had people from pharmacy, med school, nursing, public health. It was a wide range of students coming from different backgrounds from all over campus. That was rewarding.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

The end product is definitely very, very rewarding. Seeing all of that work and the output. As we said, that when we formed a team, we had a team leader in place. [Divio 00:27:30] was our team leader of this and then we collected the data. Then while analyzing, we split up into two groups. One group looked into the quantitative section, one group looked into the qualitative section. Then we came back. The both groups came back together and wrote the final report. That was a great experience. As I mentioned, hardworking people, wonderful people bringing in all sorts of voices from across campus. Rachel did a great amount of work in producing this report. Again, great job, overall teamwork. It was really, really rewarding.

Rachel Maller:

I echo everything Redwan said exactly. One of the challenges I’d say, would be getting it done, having the time because as grad students, we have a million things that we need to be doing, but this was definitely a priority for us. Then just getting everybody meeting all the time and just carrying on. I think we started it in the fall at some point, late fall. Just getting it all done, that was a challenge, just making the time for it and prioritizing it and working on it. We definitely did make it a priority, but that’s just one of the things as grad students you have to learn to do is balance all the things that we have going on. That was a bit of a challenge, but the biggest reward was just like seeing the final product. That’s always my favorite reward is just seeing the final thing and it’s all pretty and shiny. You’re like, “Yay, we did that. We made something.” It’s really cool to create something and put it out into the world, and now it’s just there.

Alexis Clark:

Yes. I definitely resonate with the joy to see something finally pay off. The last question we’d like to ask on FTFF is what is one thing you thought you knew, but were later wrong about? It doesn’t have to be in relation to school or work. It can be anything.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

I knew that that some students were having financial troubles, but our survey showed that 46% students were having financial troubles, which was more than I expected, I would say. I actually this result to a senior person in the university administration and they were like, “Yeah, we have this fund, and we have this scholarship, or you can apply for this and that.” Seeing 46% of students saying that they’re having financial problems, that’s a big, big thing. We need to look more closely into what’s actually happening here, but that was the one thing that I expected, but the magnitude was just much more larger than I expected.

Rachel Maller:

I think I was naive in how easier [inaudible 00:30:20] it is to make things happen or change at a university. That is my privilege showing completely and thinking like, “Oh, well, you just tell them this and you give them the day to day and you let them know this is the best way to do things. They’ll just change it, right?” No. Even the data doesn’t… I’m just always like, “Yes, data informed stuff,” but even giving people the data sometimes isn’t enough or just the university not being as… Just Iowa in general, not being as open to things about equity and talking about race and racism. I thought it would be a little more receptive to these things.

Rachel Maller:

I didn’t think it would be as challenging in this space, but this year definitely showed me there’s so many more challenges that even I am new about. Being a leader in that space, things don’t happen as quickly as one would like. It’s a super slow and frustrating process to make things change for the better, but it’s not that easy. It takes a lot of more work and emotional energy than one thinks, but I guess something we all figure out as we go along, we have big dreams of changing the world. Then it’s like, wait, okay, it’s not going to happen that fast, slow it down.

Steve Sonnier:

It’s very true. You feel like you can push things altogether and it takes a bit to get there, but this is incredibly informative, incredibly timely and relevant material. It’s fascinating to check out. We’ll put a link to it in our show notes, but I want to thank both you, Redwan and Rachel, for coming along today, and highlighting this material and the great work you’re doing for the University of Iowa.

Redwan Bin Abdul Baten:

Thank you for having us. Thank you so much, Steve.

Rachel Maller:

Yeah, thank you so much. I enjoyed my time here.

Steve Sonnier:

That’s it for this episode of From the Front Row. Big thanks to Rachel and Redwan for coming on with us today. This episode was hosted and written by Alexis Clark and Steve Sonnier. This episode was edited and produced by Steve Sonnier. You can find more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your colleagues. Our team can be reached at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Keep on keeping on out there.