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When you walk around campus and there's no cars driving around,
there's no people on the street.
You don't hear any noise.
I suppose if I had to sum it up in one word, I would say that it was eerie.
We went down to a bare minimum staff for sure.
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>> As it turns out,
there's a lot of people that are still here doing great work.
We've been working under some difficult circumstances for sure.
I mean, this is the first time any of us have ever experienced a pandemic.
But when we're called to action, we heed the call.
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>> We're doing details cleaning, sanitizing and
all that to keep the building clean and safe for everybody.
Well you are gonna talk to Manny right now.
He also be on the phone too [LAUGH].
Come on, Manny, come on.
>> Hey how you doing?
[LAUGH] Clean the building top to the bottom, sanitizing, you name it.
Whatever we have to do we do.
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>> I'm in the CGS building.
We took the former faculty office and
I have it set up with some ring lights and a large light stand.
A lot of us are coming into our offices to teach class where we have a good solid
internet connection and a distraction free zone.
Okay, so if you guys want to go ahead and open up a blank PowerPoint slide.
We have two hour classes during the summer so I wanted even lighting.
I wanted the green screen behind me to take out any distractions in
the background whether it's staring at what's inside a room or
your six year old running into the screen and giving you bunny ears.
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>> We have been testing a small satellite named Cupid.
Everything that we're doing is to flight qualify the satellite.
We need to do so because our launch hasn't changed its date.
And so we have had to keep up with our experiments and our testing.
And in the end, we're definitely gonna be able to hit those targets,
especially with being able to work in the lab over the last two months.
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>> You might not have thought that we were an essential employee doing video
production on campus, but everything went from a normal in person situation to
suddenly it became something that had to be virtual.
So we were there right from the get go, working for
admissions, that transitioned into open houses during the month of April and
then in May we transitioned to orientation.
We got a chance to work with a lot of different people over the course of these
past few months, and the Dean of Students Office became one of our biggest clients.
>> We still had several hundred students living on campus and we felt strongly that
we should also have the Dean of Students Office be open in case they need anything.
We removed most of the furniture in our lobby space of our office or
in person meetings that we held in the office.
We'd be standing like on the four corners of the office with our
backs against the wall, [LAUGH] talking to each other.
We also made sure that we celebrated our graduating seniors.
>> Here we are. I have been on campus all week,
I decided to take over the top floor of Questrum and
we are connecting live to the Grand tonight.
So first things first, I got my crew in here.
>> Can you imagine the Dean of Students contacting you and
saying we wanna do a dance party and we wanna have the DJ.
And we say okay.
I gotta bring the DJ into this room, I gotta bring five Zoom rooms into this
room, I got to have them all be able to interact and interconnect with each other.
Now bring in physical equipment, 12 to 14 laptops on a table with a sound mixer,
with a video switcher, and it ended up being fun.
So I think a lot of what we're doing is just connecting people,
making sure that everyone can see, hear, feel,
touch each other as though we're in the same place, although we're not.
Just kinda remove the screen as much as possible, right?
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>> I've been so encouraged and impressed by all of my colleagues.
I'm very hopeful those who feel comfortable returning to campus will
be able to safely and then those who've join from online will be able to
reap the rewards of their professors having worked on this type of teaching for
months.
>> We're prepared for it.
And we're putting in the work, cuz we want for
everyone to have that same experience as though they're here.
>> And you can't force that, that's not just done because of the paycheck that's
done because of an actual love of this community.
And our faculty and staff have rallied
behind preparing Boston University to have students back on campus.
And I cannot wait until I look out this window and
see Commonwealth Avenue full again.
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