News & Events Joining Forces: How Students, Faculty and Staff are Creatively Teaming Up

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The Five Colleges Collection searchable database contains information about cataloged objects from seven museums in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, including Amherst College. 

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When Emily Potter-Ndiaye learned the Mead Art Museum would be closing with the rest of the campus in March, she made a spreadsheet and a prediction. 

The spreadsheet was for figuring out how the Mead’s 23 student employees could keep working for the museum from a distance. And the prediction? That the remote work arrangements would generate an “accessibility boon” for the Mead’s collection online.

“What I’m hoping is that we can develop some resources that will get us not just through the spring, but will also make the Mead’s educational resources more visible and accessible to classes for the years to come,” said Potter-Ndiaye, the Dwight and Kirsten Poler and Andrew W. Mellon Head of Education and Curator of Academic Programs at the museum.

Four weeks later, the Mead has established online work arrangements for its three interns and five museum educators. Even the 15 lobby attendants have been reassigned to help with research, writing, cataloging, video editing and publicity tasks they can complete from home. 

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The #MeadFromHome collection invites visitors to reimagine a work of art from the Mead’s collection and submit it for inclusion on the Mead's Instagram @meadartmuseum.

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The students who work with the Mead’s public programs and marketing specialist, Danielle Amodeo ’13, are helping promote the new virtual tour and #MeadFromHome Instagram series. And European Print Specialist Miloslava Hruba created the “50 Artwork Challenge” for her team of interns. Each week, they add keywords to at least 50 of the Mead’s 1,800 untitled artworks online. 

For example, Boris Grigoriev’s “Untitled,” a whimsical pencil drawing of human figures, was sketched on the back of a colorful handwritten French menu. Knowing this gives the figures sudden context: Aha! Grigoriev must have been drawing the people he observed in a crowded café at lunchtime! But no one who searched the Five Colleges Collections Database could have easily located the work before Annie Martin ’22 added new keywords: “figure, representational - conversation; cafe; alcohol; menu.”

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Untitled, a pencil drawing the Boris Grigoriev sketched on the back of a handwritten French menu.

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The student interns are also inputting colors as keywords, in support of chemistry professor Chris Durr's recent class in collaboration with the Mead. For example, Bethany Letendre ’22 added to the keywords of Josef Albers 1972 work, "Untitled," these terms: shapes; geometrical; depth; gray; yellow; dimensions; square; gold.

“Some things that were back-burner have become front-burner,” says Potter-Ndiaye, who has enjoyed “nerding out on museum education” with her students. “We’re trying to reflect on what we are learning from this [time of social-distancing],” she says, “and not just what we are losing from it.”—Mary Elizabeth Strunk

Think of it as a kind of swap meet—though it goes by a more dignified name: Remote Work Resource Exchange, a skills-sharing effort being coordinated by the College’s human resources department. The exchange proves that even if staffers work from home, they don’t have to work in isolation.

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“The goal is that it’s sort of a self-service,” says Fredricka Joyner, director of organization development and engagement. “So a supervisor could go on there and look at the names of the people who’ve put themselves in the registry and reach out to them, or a staff person might see something that an office or department has listed, that they want to reach out and say that they’d be willing to work on.”

So far, some two dozen staffers have offered to help as needed, adding their names to the registry—the number doubling in just a day. They hail from a variety of departments, including geology, admission, advancement, theater and dance, chemistry and the Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning. 

In the days to come, they might be matched to the Science Center, which needs peer technical coaching as well as communications assistance, or Frost Library, which is asking for help with data entry. As more supervisors sign up, opportunities will rise. 

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Gilbert Wermeling ’19, a graduate associate in the music department, is one of the first to take on new duties. He’s now working with the facilities department on the graphic design and promotion of information on how residence hall heating systems work, and on tips for students on the use of their specific hall’s thermostat.

Karla Youngblood, director of facilities operations, connected with Wermeling and is delighted he’s turning up the heat, as it were, on the project. As she says: “We are getting a lot of value from the exchange and getting a student’s perspective in a very direct, efficient way.” 

Adds Wermeling: “I think we should each strive to help others as much as our own unique situation allows, at all times but especially right now. For me, signing up for the Remote Work Exchange was one of the ways that I could help a community I care about.” —Bill Sweet 

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SURF researcher Jin Jeon ’22 sits at the microinjection station where she painstakingly inserted tiny rings of DNA into sea anemone embryos. Jeon’s work will contribute to a Ragkousi lab publication on the role of the cytoskeleton during embryonic development.

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Let’s say you’re an Amherst student whose work-study job involves hands-on research in the lab, maybe extracting DNA from bear fur follicles, or learning how to use a YAG crystal laser in physics research, or observing fidgety preschoolers in a psychology study.

Now let’s say you have to leave campus indefinitely. How do you earn the money you had expected to earn, if remote work is impossible?

Ask Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty Austin Sarat to find you a new position—even if it’s outside of your academic area or skill set.

Sarat, also the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, was tasked with recruiting faculty members to take on students who found they couldn’t do their paying jobs from afar when the College transitioned to remote learning. He placed 20 students in research assistantships across the disciplines.

Some found themselves beyond their academic areas or with undeveloped skill sets for their new jobs. That’s not a bad place to be, Sarat says.

“By exposing many of them to new ways of thinking and new approaches to problem-solving, we hope that the experience will contribute to the development of their creativity, ingenuity and inventiveness,” he explains. As a result, “they may be intrigued and encouraged to explore areas of the curriculum that they might not have otherwise explored.”

Biology major Katie Lingen ’22, who had been studying cellular notch signaling in Professor Caroline Goutte’s biology lab, was hired by Assistant Professor Ivan Contreras to help create supplemental materials for two of his courses in math and statistics.

“It has been a bit of an adjustment, for sure,” says Lingen, adding that graph theory, math and coding are not her “strong suits.” “But we are also making connections to my work in biology, which has brought the work a bit closer to home for me.” Another perk? “It has been fun to push myself and learn about a subject that seemed quite daunting at first.”

As another thinker with a five-letter surname with two A’s once said: “A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.” No, not Austin Sarat: Frank Zappa. —Caroline Hanna