To better understand the needs and interests of the WheatCAP graduate students we conduct annual surveys. Below are responses to select questions. All results can be found here.
Question 6. How confident are you in the following skill sets?
Question 10. Percentage of Wheat-CAP students interested in plant breeding.
88% of the Wheat-CAP students are interested in Plant Breeding.
Question 11. Percentage of Wheat-CAP students who want to pursue a career in plant breeding.
79% of the Wheat-CAP students want to pursue a career in plant breeding.
Question 13. How has Covid-19 impacted your education and research progress?
Student Responses:
- It helped me prioritize identifying the career I am interested in and focus on developing skills for the relevant job descriptions. Silver lining!
- Less interaction with other students and other universities.
- Slowed progress a little.
- It has made doing some lab work hard to schedule.
- Finding undergraduate help has been more difficult.
- No.
- Covid and my move really slowed my progress down, things will pick back up this year.
- Covid lockdowns mainly caused some of my screening of my population used in the WheatCAP to be delayed for a couple of months. Otherwise, not a huge impact on graduation date.
- Not too much, field work didn’t be affected too much by Covid.
- The pandemic delayed the scheduling of my oral preliminary examination. My research was scaled back in multiple ways. I was unable to make planned crosses during the spring and summer of 2020. I had additional experiments planned that I was unable to conducted. However, I was able to plant my last two yield trials in the summer of 2020 and 2021, and my planned graduation date remains unchanged.
- Had moderate impact.
- Little impact.
- It has caused me to start off in a very isolated bubble, I am just now beginning to connect with people from around my field.
Question 14. How can we better serve you in coping with the changes caused by Covid-19?
- Funding! Having to TA during Covid has not been very productive and is draining on productivity.
- NA
- NA
- Hard to say, staying connected is very helpful.
- None needed at this time.
- More online meetings rather than face to face meeting.
- NA
- One thing that has been brought up is extending funding that groups did not use to be used next year for students whose graduation dates have been pushed back.
- Continue the online zoom meeting is a good option.
- It would’ve been great to have continued some sort of periodic social hour event after the sessions with Loriana came to an end.
- Online meeting.
- It’s better to receive training and take workshop online by zoom.
- Help with funding for meetings at fun educational venues.
Question 15. Suggestions for future education opportunities?
- Take a poll of students and define who wants to work in the field with plants in their career, and who wants to work on a computer. Develop education opportunities relevant to each of these groups (ie. as someone who wants to work on the computer I’m not that interested in traveling to breeding site opportunities as I am interested in trainings on data management, etc).
- Mandating internship opportunities for WheatCAP students with interests in industry.
- Organize a field/breeding/processing workshop like the UMN and NDSU were supposed to host in 2020.
- Gene editing and Phenomics are good topics in future training.
- Going to conferences or CYMMIT.
