In spring 2020, many U.S. colleges and universities rapidly shifted to online instruction and implemented social distancing policies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students experienced unprecedented disruption of their interpersonal academic and social networks due to the loss of physical proximity. We used egocentric network analysis and latent profile analysis with survey data from April 2020 and conducted follow-up interviews in September 2020 to examine some of the pandemic’s immediate effects on student interpersonal network change. We found the disappearance of interpersonal network patterns featuring coworkers and academic ties, as well as reductions in students’ overall number of connections and the role diversity of their networks. Results suggest potential ongoing reduction of peer academic relationships, implying that institutional personnel may need to pay particular attention to academic connections in online spaces and to regenerating students’ academic networks when on-campus physical spaces may again be used to support learning.

In this article, we examine how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) lab settings influence graduate school socialization and climate for Students of Color. While the literature has highlighted the importance of labs within STEM graduate education and the impediments to success for graduate Students of Color, limited research has explicitly attended to the experiences of graduate Students of Color within their respective labs. Understanding how STEM graduate Students of Color perceive and are affected by their experiences in their labs is imperative if educators are to better support their success. This article demonstrates that these STEM lab settings are often sites of isolation, competition, and dysfunction for graduate Students of Color. And, despite institutional efforts and support structures, graduate Students of Color are forced to create their own structures of support in order to exist within these conditions.

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The COVID-19 pandemic-related social distancing practices that colleges implemented in Spring 2020 disrupted the typical mechanisms of propinquity (physical proximity) and homophily (shared characteristics) that physical institutions rely on to help students build and maintain relationships critical to learning and wellbeing. To explore how social distancing shaped students’ academic and social networks and associated educational outcomes, we conceptualized it as a “network shock” and collected unique ego network data in April 2020. For participating students, maintaining interactions with the same set of individuals before and after social distancing was related to more positive outcomes across a range of self-reported wellbeing and learning indicators. On average, students experienced a loss of frequent academic contacts, while they maintained or replaced social interactions in their interpersonal networks after social distancing. Our investigation of the ways students experienced changes in their social and academic networks after a loss of physical proximity points to the role of interpersonal interaction network continuity for fostering wellbeing and learning in times of disruption, as well as the potential need for support in maintaining or rebuilding academic networks.

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The student author, whose presentation of the scholarship herein was approved by the program of study committee, is solely responsible for the content of this dissertation. The Graduate College will ensure this dissertation is globally accessible and will not permit alterations after a degree is conferred.