How BYU Marriott Coped with—and Conquered—the COVID-19 Challenge
During the “great toilet paper shortage of 2020,” as Jonathon Wood calls it, Wood found himself checking with BYU Marriott students to see whether they had enough tissue and hand sanitizer—not something he ever imagined would be on his list of responsibilities as managing director of BYU Marriott’s Whitmore Global Business Center (GBC).
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, his students’ needs had shifted. As countries around the globe declared national emergencies and the world got a crash course in epidemiology, many students worried about learning online, encountering financial struggles, or losing opportunities. And their concerns were valid. While more than 800 students had been signed to postgraduation positions as the end of the Winter 2020 semester neared, 80 graduate and 190 undergraduate students lost or couldn’t find full-time work, and more than 500 students still needed summer internships. For many students, uncertainty about the future spread, as infectious as a virus itself.
To fight the myriad, large-scale effects of COVID-19, scientists around the world studied miniscule coronavirus particles through electron microscopes to learn more about them. In a similar strategy, BYU Marriott faculty and staff focused on connecting with each student individually—looking at them through a microscope, if you will. In an early 2020 request to alumni and friends to help students find aid, opportunities, and moral support during the pandemic, BYU Marriott dean Brigitte C. Madrian acknowledged the critical need to serve and sustain students at such a crucial point in their careers. “If ever there were a time we need miracles,” she wrote, “it is now.”
Internship Improvisation
Something extraordinary certainly did happen when it came to finding work and internships for students who lacked them. Due to a generous alumni response and resourceful networking, many of the students in need of full-time work were able to secure positions in their fields. And an innovative program put together in record time gave students a nontraditional, though equally beneficial, option in place of conventional internships.
“Through a collaborative effort, we created a program called the summer experience, which was initially organized to assist students who had lost their internships as a result of COVID-19 and to place them with another company,” says Miguel Pomar, director of employer engagement in BYU Marriott’s Business Career Center. “Some of these companies were funding these positions, but many of them were not. We offset the cost and paid for those students’ experiences through the donations made by friends of the school.”
Through the summer experience program, more than seventy students successfully completed internships and gained much-needed experience. Networking with companies and securing positions for those students “helped us stretch in ways we’ve never done before to prepare our students,” Pomar says. “This gave us a lot of confidence that when we bring our hearts and minds together to find solutions, we can put together amazing miracles.”
International Aid
For international students and the BYU Marriott employees dedicated to supporting them, the pandemic threw things out of order. “Policies on international-student internships changed, and that left a lot of students feeling extra stress,” Wood says. Each student’s situation was different, though many had similar questions: Will I be able to work in the United States over the summer? Will I need to return to my home country? If I am out of the country, will I be able to come to campus in the fall?
“It was all about working with these students to understand the regulations and the rules and trying to find creative solutions,” Wood explains. Employees managed details that ranged from ensuring students had basic needs, such as food and sanitation products, to negotiating more complex issues, such as housing.
As the pandemic persists, the personnel of the GBC continue to help international students through challenges that arise. “I can’t even remember, at this point, all of the different little details that we’ve had to work through to keep people safe and happy and healthy,” Wood says. “There are definitely extra hours and extra work, but we like doing it. It’s a labor of love for us.”
Online Overhaul
Putting in extra hours is something Melissa F. Western, associate professor and Rachel Martin Faculty Fellow in the School of Accountancy, also knows a lot about. She estimates that since March 2020, teaching has taken up 30 percent more of her time—and for Western and other BYU Marriott professors engaged not only in teaching but also in research, service, and other responsibilities, that’s a significant increase. But the returns, Western says, are worth it.
“When we transitioned to online learning, we redesigned our whole Canvas site, working with BYU Online to develop high-quality, visually appealing content,” says Western, who teaches in the intense junior core. “Rather than saying, ‘Here’s a list of what you need to do,’ we created navigation modules, animations, and videos—things that allow students to learn the content when they’re ready to learn.” The redesign aimed to negate many issues related to remote learning, including troubles with internet connection, imperfect learning environments, or fewer opportunities to interact with the instructor.
“It’s been an enormous amount of work, but it works well,” she continues, noting that it even improved student experiences in some aspects, such as content mastery. “You take an extremely hard topic and make it into a cartoon, and students can watch that cartoon as many times as they need until they get it. Overall, that’s how we’ve tried to support students—committing to redoing the content in a way that meets their needs.”
Transforming the Tanner
Online learning tools weren’t the only things that got a makeover in the last year. The Tanner Building also underwent significant alterations to provide students with the safest environment possible when BYU transitioned to blended classes for fall 2020.
“The students needed to have a way to be instructed safely in person and virtually,” says Barb Hehl, facilities manager and executive assistant in the Deans Office. Working alongside the school’s Building Care personnel as well as BYU’s Space Management, Carpenter Shop, and Air Conditioning Shop, the facilities management team reduced existing seating capacity by about 75 percent and ensured the building would be sanitary, safe, and well ventilated. Team members calculated maximum capacity for each space to comply with social distancing guidelines; adapted large areas, such as hosting rooms, into classrooms; removed and stored unnecessary desks and furniture; and developed road maps for safe pedestrian traffic flow.
“So many people came together to put things in place,” Hehl says. “It was a COVID-19 miracle that we were prepared in time for the students to arrive.”
Socializing Through the Screen
Logging into collaboration platform Slack is usually how the average weekday begins for Tom Meservy, associate professor of information systems and faculty advisor to the Association for Information Systems (AIS). After addressing student questions, “I go to my blended class, then back to my office and host office hours over Zoom,” Meservy says. “If I have an assignment due that night, I’m usually back on Slack, answering questions. Making myself available for students virtually is important because these are some of the only connections with faculty—and with each other—that students have.”
Discussion boards are only the beginning when it comes to the IS department’s community-building efforts. “When the pandemic began, all of a sudden we were having to do a lot more and be more explicit about how you try to engage with and create a community,” says Meservy. “We’re constantly trying to create that community with our students.”
The key to those community-building efforts? A good imagination and a lot of hard work. Fall 2020 saw club socials featuring games of Scattergories, scavenger hunts, and a talent show—all virtual. Also, as part of a teacher-appreciation event, the AIS student council hosted a photo-caption contest featuring snapshots of faculty members when they were adolescents.
Students and faculty have learned to be innovative in their approaches to connecting with others. “Gove Allen, associate professor of information systems, made more than 140 loaves of bread for our IS-core students,” Meservy says. “And AIS student officer Spencer Jensen has done a great job connecting student mentors to mentees and creating a supportive environment. Overall, when it comes to benefitting the next generation of students, we’re going to have a net gain as a result of having gone through this.”
In his MBA courses, William and Roceil Low Professor of Business Strategy Paul Godfrey encourages his students to connect socially and spiritually. “A lot of classes have a spiritual thought at the beginning of class, but we’ve expanded that into a talk of about ten minutes or so every class period,” he says. “This gives students the chance to tell us how they’re doing and share some spiritual experiences, because we’re just not getting those opportunities as often as we need to. We’re taking every chance we can get to build each other up as a community—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.”
Front Lines of Mental Health
When classes moved online in March, Godfrey made the majority of his course content asynchronous and used class time to meet for thirty minutes with each of his students. “That was not a trivial exercise—over the course of the last two semesters, I’ve spent the equivalent of almost a full work week meeting with students,” Godfrey says. “One of the things I remembered from twenty years ago, after the terrorist attacks in 2001, was that what students needed more than anything else was someone to talk to. So we talked about how the pandemic had affected and would affect them, their families, and their jobs. We moved outside of a classroom mode into a mode of just people talking to each other and being concerned about each other.”
Godfrey and other faculty members have found that they are, as Western says, “on the front lines of students’ mental health.” Stress often causes students to turn inward and push people away, so Western aims to help students relate to one another’s challenges. “I share big failures of mine in class to show students that their experiences are relatable,” she says. “And then I talk about how I overcame them. Students are down, so I just remind them that I’ve been down, we’ve all been down, but there is a way that we can endure.”
Students in the IS department receive a weekly mental health check-in survey, which helps them tap into available resources and keeps faculty and staff aware of student needs. And throughout the pandemic, the BYU Marriott Student Council’s mental health committee has “worked extremely hard to plan events that students would benefit from,” says Kathryn Sobczak, a 2020 graduate in strategic management and former executive director of the committee. “The council president and I worked together to make this a standing committee, meaning the mental health committee will have dedicated seats year after year.”
Challenge with Compassion
Cassy Budd, Nemrow Excellence in Teaching Professor in the School of Accountancy, remembers the brief period at the end of Winter 2020 semester, when classes moved online, as her “baptism by fire.”
“Learning how to teach virtually during a global health crisis has been challenging, but it’s also actually been rewarding,” she says. “There are things we’ve learned that I think will carry forward to future years.” One of the things Budd believes she will carry forward is an increased awareness of and responsiveness to her students’ needs, even the microscopic ones.
Budd describes herself as “an exacting professor,” and, like Western, she teaches in the most taxing year of the accountancy program, the junior core. But as Fall 2020 semester kicked off, Budd began exploring a revised approach: reaching out more to her students even as she continued to challenge them.
“I remember thinking to myself that I needed to have a guiding principle for this year that was going to trump everything. For me, that guiding principle has been grace—grace for myself, grace for my colleagues, grace for my students, grace for the whole situation that we are in,” she says. “And though we’ve all got Zoom fatigue and we all miss humanity, there have been some profound results. I’ve been so impressed with the students and their willingness to recommit every day to doing the very best they can.”
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Written by Clarissa McIntire
Photography by BYU Photo
This feature article was originally published in BYU Marriott's 2020 Annual Report.
