Diane Anstine graduated from Miami with two degrees in Economics: BA in 1990 and MA in 1991. She is currently the Dean of the School of Business and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Economics at North Central College. 

• Has COVID affected your every day work life? If so, how? I am a dean at a college—everything has been upended with the pandemic
• What are some ways this new way of life has benefited the way you look at your daily work operations? One of the good things to come from the pandemic is a reprioritization of what is important and purposeful thought as to how to promote those things. We have really had to think through our core functions including the most basic ideas of how we teach effectively in ways that we would never have done without an event such as this. Having to adjust has led to faculty really thinking about what is important, how to deliver the important ideas, how to assess student knowledge, and how to connect with students.
• Has doing more virtual meetings, etc, shown to be more beneficial to how you can be productive in your daily activities? I think the virtual meetings provide some benefits in that individuals who may not have been able to attend a meeting can participate from afar but the personal aspect of meetings, the seeing people and being able to interact without the yells about “you’re still on mute’” is lost.
• Once COVID has slowed down do you think this will affect your future way of continuing to do your work? I believe there will be more opportunities to participate in events occurring outside your immediate campus or city at minimal cost as well as the ability to collaborate more effectively with others both near and far. Being able to use virtual meetings will help with that. But, I do fear the loss of snow days for everyone from kindergarten through college, sadly.
• If you are involved in research- has your research been able to grow and expand due to more time at home working? My position does not entail a lot of research but all my time has moved to pandemic response so I have lost all free time. As the chair of our College’s Academic Response Team, I have been working on all the academics related issues to adjust to the pandemic, concentrating on schedules and teaching modalities and all issues related to faculty and student coursework.
• Has having an Eco degree benefited you during this time? The most obvious application is in thinking about how to allocate the scare resources of money, time and, frankly, emotional bandwidth to competing needs. I think about opportunity costs and the fact that people respond to incentives every single day. However, in a bigger sense, the ability to think about complex problems and how to break them down with logic and data is training I believe I learned as an economist.