Really appreciate all your help @ptrblck!  I am using a GCP vm, their deep learning image. I was on pytorch version 1.4.0 and that is what was causing the issue! Upgrading to 1.5.1 ended up fixing the issue but causing slowness in dataloader, so I compiled using source from github (assuming this way I also got all the computation support libraries specific to the platform) and everything seems to be working fine now! 
Apologies to have bothered you for something that ended up being a version issue. I wouldn’t have imagined that this could be the culprit and so it didn’t cross my mind to try a newer version (and searching didn’t turn up any results). Thanks again for all your help!!!