Students, Faculty and Staff Rise to the Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic created many challenges, but it also created many opportunities for those willing and ready to help. Farmer School students and faculty rose to the challenge in many different ways over the course of 2020.

Visiting assistant professor Justin McGlothin used his knowledge of technology to create a series of videos to help other faculty prepare for the change to remote learning and to help students and faculty learn to communicate effectively.

“The first couple of videos I put together were staff- or faculty-facing. Then a switch went off in my mind to not do just faculty-facing videos, but to do them in a way that could help students too,” McGlothlin recalled. “One of the videos I put together was how to do a team presentation on WebEx. The idea there was to help educate our faculty on how it could be used, and then also in the same format, be able to share it with students so that they could learn how to use it as well.” He noted that remote learning can be disruptive for students, but also presented an opportunity for tangible benefits. “We’ve tried to position this as

‘Here’s another opportunity to learn, to develop skills to work remotely, because most of the time, you’ll have some sort of remote interactivity with either staff

or customers,’” McGlothin noted. “So I’ve kind of positioned it as a really good thing to add to their skillset.”

Meanwhile, accountancy professor Brian Ballou became a familiar face for hundreds of KPMG interns in the United States this summer as he led them through parts of their virtual training sessions. Ballou and Auburn professor emeritus Rick Tabor developed and recorded portions of the KPMG Virtual Internship Experience.

“In a normal summer, we’ll go around to a number of offices and do workshops for interns on how to think about clients from a risk-based perspective,” Ballou said. “This year, obviously, we couldn’t do that.”

“What we were able to do is convey some of the leading skills and abilities that accountants need to be successful in today’s environment. We used publicly-available information to convey different areas of knowledge and expertise that should be useful to them in public accounting,” Ballou explained. “So they can get a sense of how things work in public accounting and then what they might want to work on while they’re still in school before they go back to the firm.” Lauren Speelman, a sophomore marketing major, decided to bring some happiness to healthcare workers and patients dealing with the pandemic. “I had seen people collecting letters and delivering them to hospitals, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s such a great idea,’” Speelman recalled. “And for about a week, I was waiting around, seeing if someone in my community would do it. And when I didn’t see that happening, I asked myself, ‘Why don’t I do that?’” From her home near Columbus, Speelman reached out to organizations, groups, and friends, asking them to contribute to a program she called Stamps of Support. More than 200 letters later, she was delivering them to Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Mount Carmel St. Ann’s Hospital, and a senior citizen home. “The woman that came to the door to meet me, she was almost in tears.

When I called, she told the residents about it and they were so excited,” Speelman said.

“If you want to see something done, you’re more than capable of doing it and anyone can make an impact. It doesn’t even have to be something big. I’m sure I got a couple hand cramps here and there, but that’s the most minor inconvenience,” Speelman explained. “Seeing

the smiles when I do these letter dropoffs it just makes it so worth it. It’s very easy to make an impact, so I would just

emphasize to do what you can.”

Some Farmer School students took on a more direct role in finding solutions to pandemic problems, even if they didn’t know it when classes began. Entrepreneurship professor Tom Heuer’s Corporate Entrepreneurship students were tasked with finding alumni-founded UVC The Light Force a go-to-market strategy and ways for the company to be socially responsible. Heuer’s Enterprise Consulting class was doing consulting work with Gravity Diagnostics at the same time. Both companies suddenly found themselves on the front-lines of the fight against COVID-19.

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Seven teams of students were assigned to tackle the two concepts sought by UV-C The Light Force. The day after the company explained their anti-microbial UV-C light system to the students, Miami University moved to remote learning due to the coronavirus.

“It was pretty remarkable that it happened to be this particular client that we had gotten at this particular time,” junior entrepreneurship and English literature student Nick Murphy said. “I think it made our research definitely more applicable, but also just more engaging. It was so topical and we could feel like we were really contributing something that was relevant to a massive issue on a global scale.”

“There was not a group of students on this project from which we didn’t pull something we could use from their presentation,” company founder Rick Rechter II said. “We felt so privileged to be part of the program, and it was a fun experience to work with the students and get their input. They’re all much smarter than I am. So it was very beneficial.”

Meanwhile, Gravity Diagnostics was tasked by the state of Kentucky with providing 48-hour turnaround times for COVID-19 tests. The students worked closely with the company throughout this semester to assist them with some of their strategic growth goals. “We helped them define their Unique Value Proposition so they can show people how special their testing really is,” student Molly Zilch said. “We have learned that it is more than just a test, it is about that individual person who they are helping whether it be drug addiction or they are severely sick.”

“This group is incredibly professional and have produced quality content for Gravity. They definitely get an A+ from me,”

Ted Knauf, director of business operations at Gravity Diagnostics, wrote. “Your students have demonstrated an immense capacity for understanding how a business can succeed by building an understanding of the market, stakeholders, etc. — no doubt this will serve them well in any entrepreneurial endeavors they pursue.”

Information systems and analytics professors Maria Weese and Waldyn Martinez helped chemistry and biochemistry faculty in their search for possible treatments for antibiotic-resistant secondary infections common with COVID-19 by using technology tools to help the effort. “To find a potentially useful compound, a laboratory would have to test millions of possible compounds — making the search much like finding a needle in a haystack,” Weese said. “This is where a machine learning model can help.”

Weese and Martinez worked with Center for Analytics and Data Science interns on the project, which continued into the fall.

“The CADS students extracted thousands of measurements about each chemical compound (structure, bond strengths, etc.) and related those structural measurements to whether these compounds are likely to be a good inhibitor or not using a machine learning model,” Weese said. “The machine learning model is able to rank the compounds from most likely to be a good inhibitor to least likely and can be applied to any compound’s structural characteristics.”

Time and again in 2020, the faculty and students at the Farmer School of B It is creative problem solving, at its core Business rose to the occasion to take advantage of the opportunities presented during the global pandemic, ensuring that they would be Beyond Ready for whatever the future holds. b