Improving Graduate Education to Support a Branching Career Pipeline: Recommendations Based on a Survey of Doctoral Students in the Basic Biomedical Sciences

Fuhrmann, Cynthia N.; Halme, Dina Gould; O’Sullivan, Patricia; Lindstaedt, Bill

doi:10.1187/cbe.11-02-0013

Cited by 252 publications

(351 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…A graduate education in the sciences produces individuals with broadly applicable skills in critical thinking and problem-solving, whose expertise could be invaluable in fields such as science policy and administration, the commerce of science, science writing, the law, and science education at all levels. Furthermore, recent surveys reveal that a substantial fraction of today's graduate students in the sciences are interested in pursuing nonresearch careers (13,14). However, for the most part, neither the faculty nor the students are well enough informed about such careers.…”

Section: Bringing the Biomedical Enterprise Intomentioning

confidence: 99%

Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws

Alberts

Kirschner

Tilghman

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

706

676

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The long-held but erroneous assumption of never-ending rapid growth in biomedical science has created an unsustainable hypercompetitive system that is discouraging even the most outstanding prospective students from entering our profession-and making it difficult for seasoned investigators to produce their best work. This is a recipe for long-term decline, and the problems cannot be solved with simplistic approaches. Instead, it is time to confront the dangers at hand and rethink some fundamental features of the US biomedical research ecosystem.graduate education | postdoctoral education | federal funding | peer review

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Section: Bringing the Biomedical Enterprise Intomentioning

confidence: 99%

Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws

Alberts

Kirschner

Tilghman

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

706

676

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Concerning DRE, we were able to identify two PCs [student writes and submits manuscripts to journals, and student participates or presents at conferences and seminars] that significantly predict productivity. These results provide empirical support for the efficacy of practices that focus on intensive technical writing activities [39,45] and of having doctoral students actively engage in the publication process early in their training [38]. For the students we surveyed, this meant producing papers even before writing their own dissertation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…As such, we labeled this component "Mentor helps students with actual bench work." From these results, we observed that mentoring practices in our survey sites were not only confined to research advising, guidance, and helping hone analytical and technical skills [38]. Instead, they also included experience in co-directing projects (research management), co-authoring papers, and receiving help in the job search [42][43][44].…”

Section: Doctoral Mentoring Practicesmentioning

confidence: 82%

Research experiences and mentoring practices in selected east asian graduate programs: Predictors of research productivity among doctoral students in molecular biology

Ynalvez

Garza‐Gongora

Ynalvez

et al. 2014

Biochem Molecular Bio Educ

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Although doctoral mentors recognize the benefits of providing quality advisement and close guidance, those of sharing project management responsibilities with mentees are still not well recognized. We observed that mentees, who have the opportunity to co-manage projects, generate more written output. Here we examine the link between research productivity, doctoral mentoring practices (DMP), and doctoral research experiences (DRE) of mentees in programs in the non-West. Inspired by previous findings that early career productivity is a strong predictor of later productivity, we examine the research productivity of 210 molecular biology doctoral students in selected programs in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. Using principal component (PC) analysis, we derive two sets of PCs: one set from 15 DMP and another set from 16 DRE items. We model research productivity using Poisson and negativebinomial regression models with these sets as predictors. Our findings suggest a need to re-think extant practices and to allocate resources toward professional career development in training future scientists. We contend that doctoral science training must not only be an occasion for future scientists to learn scientific and technical skills, but it must also be the opportunity to experience, to acquire, and to hone research management skills. V C 2014 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 42(4):305-322, 2014.

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“…Importantly, the creation of mentored teaching opportunities for our senior graduate students and postdoctoral fellows was meaningful not only for their scientific development [17] but also to allow them a professional development opportunity in education that is not as readily available on a medical campus as it might be on an undergraduate campus. The importance of professional development opportunities outside of experimental science has become increasingly essential as the diversity of students' professional goals has come to light [18,19].…”

Section: Box 3bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leading change: Curriculum reform in graduate education in the biomedical sciences

Dasgupta

Symes

Hyman

2015

Biochem Molecular Bio Educ

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The Division of Graduate Medical Sciences at the Boston University School of Medicine houses numerous dynamic graduate programs. Doctoral students began their studies with laboratory rotations and classroom training in a variety of fundamental disciplines. Importantly, with 15 unique pathways of admission to these doctoral programs, there were also 15 unique curricula. Departments and programs offered courses independently, and students participated in curricula that were overlapping combinations of these courses. This system created curricula that were not coordinated and that had redundant course content as well as content gaps. A partnership of key stakeholders began a curriculum reform process to completely restructure doctoral education at the Boston University School of Medicine. The key pedagogical goals, objectives, and elements designed into the new curriculum through this reform process created a curriculum designed to foster the interdisciplinary thinking that students are ultimately asked to utilize in their research endeavors. We implemented comprehensive student and peer evaluation of the new Foundations in Biomedical Sciences integrated curriculum to assess the new curriculum. Furthermore, we detail how this process served as a gateway toward creating a more fully integrated graduate experience, under the umbrella of the Program in Biomedical Sciences. V C 2015 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 43(2):126-132, 2015.Keywords: graduate education; curriculum reform; biomedical science; interdisciplinary; doctoral education Introduction Doctoral education has been based on an apprentice model in the biological sciences for many decades; however, even given this practical emphasis on the applied science, it has still been noted that, "We should focus less on the production of PhDs and more on the production of scientists. They are not necessarily the same thing" [1]. Certainly, the apprentice model does run the risk of producing graduates with highly specialized knowledge about their area of expertise with little appreciation of the context of their work [2]. Moreover, there has been a national call toward moving our scientific educational programs in an interdisciplinary direction, and much of the initial focus of these efforts has been at the undergraduate level [3,4]. However, a shifting funding landscape toward interdisciplinary and translational science [5] has helped to catalyze discussions on teaching science as an integrated process of inquiry that is less concerned with discipline-specific facts [6,7].As this educational movement has filtered into the arena of graduate education, a number of proposals have been put forth from encouraging curriculum fellows to develop integrated graduate courses [8,9] to developing graduate-level laboratory courses [10]. What these interventions have in common is a focus on developing interdisciplinary educational opportunities that apply to the research paradigm in which graduate students will be embedded [11][12][13]. In...

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Improving Graduate Education to Support a Branching Career Pipeline: Recommendations Based on a Survey of Doctoral Students in the Basic Biomedical Sciences

Cited by 252 publications

References 16 publications

Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws

Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws

Research experiences and mentoring practices in selected east asian graduate programs: Predictors of research productivity among doctoral students in molecular biology

Leading change: Curriculum reform in graduate education in the biomedical sciences

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