As my classmates, lab-mates, some professors, roommate, and now my sister know, I am less than satisfied with the quality of coursework at my school. (For anyone who doesn't know, I am in my first year of a PhD program in biology.) My expectations of graduate school were not defined in detail at the beginning of the year, but after a semester and a few weeks of pointless courses, I am now seeing what should be changed. These courses are all laid out in lecture format (even if they claim to be discussion-based) and the even the exams that say they require critical thought can be aced using rote memorization.
Now in undergrad, I would have thought these courses were stellar and probably raved about them. That is because an undergraduate bio major should be exposed to many general areas of study within the field and given a strong base of knowledge upon which to build a career. You won't get far if you don't know what transcription and translation are, for example. A graduate student, however, has already proven by virtue of obtaining a Bachelor's degree that he or she is adept at memorization of facts. The next step is discovering if said graduate student can think critically about a problem in order to ask an interesting question that can be answered using available methods and contribute in a significant way to a particular biological field. Critical thinking and logic are skills that every PhD will need no matter if they are in academia, biotech, science writing, science and technology policy, or patent law.
Here's a nice allegory to drive home my point:
Do you assume that every first grader can read because they have been exposed to books? Well some of them might pick it up without being taught; maybe Dad shows Johnny some of the easy words and that plus Sesame Street help Johnny get through most of "Go Dog Go." But can he read the tough words? Can he read a newspaper? Probably not without being taught, and even with good teaching it will take years before Johnny can read at an adult level. Now take this up to the PhD level and you've got the current situation at my school, with "Dad" being the PI, "Sesame Street" being talks and seminars, and I'm Johnny, only my teachers won't teach me how to read so how long do you think it will take me to get to the "adult" level?
So after all this ranting, what solution do I propose? I'm glad you asked. First of all, PhD students should have some classes all to themselves. Not all of them, mind you, because it is important that interaction occur between all levels and disciplines, but at least one course per semester should be just PhD students. This way the class can focus on reading papers and critically analyzing them (whereas that is not necessarily what Master's students were expecting from their program). Everyone reads a review or two of a field to get a general understanding, then a primary paper, and then does a literature search to come up with one or two other papers to read on his or her own. This ensures that students will not know all of the same background and therefore will have to explain things to each other. Class will be held in small groups of 10-12, preferably sitting in a circle or at a conference table. Technical questions on the reading will be first, then critical comments about the methods used and proposal of alternative methods with pros and cons for each. Then discussion on whether or not the authors had enough information to draw the conclusions that they did, and if not, deciding what additional evidence would be convincing. Finally, the class should discuss what new questions the findings bring up and talk about ideas for future experiments. Yes, this does sound kind of like a journal club, but has a couple of important differences: 1) It covers a wide range of fields that require different types of critical thinking. 2) The focus is on teaching the students, so incorrect or naive ideas are expected, not looked down upon.
If these changes were made I would be that much closer to becoming an independent scientist. Sadly, it looks like I'll have to wait for an underpaid postdoc position to learn by trial and error the skills that I am ready to be taught now.
What's crazy is that your "journal club" class idea is something that happened in discussion sections for several of my undergrad classes. In lower-div courses, the sections were mostly used for going over homework, but in upper-div courses there were weekly papers assigned with the exact kind of analysis and discussion you were talking about - one of my genetics classes even included this type of material on midterm and final exams!
ReplyDeleteI realize now that, despite being yet another hour of class that interfered with my undergrad yearnings to take a longer nap or have another beer, the discussion sections that accompanied my lectures at UCLA were one of the smartest things a large school could do to get the students in a large lecture class thinking critically about the material. I really took them for granted at the time, but I'm super grateful now that I actually learned how to critically read papers as an undergrad because like you said we're really not getting that at the moment. I know USC also does this for its undergrad classes, so I suppose I am surprised that there isn't something more like it at the graduate level.