Artigo Revisado por pares

The proving ground

2008; The Company of Biologists; Volume: 121; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1242/jcs.023986

ISSN

1477-9137

Autores

Mole,

Tópico(s)

Artistic and Creative Research

Resumo

Ha – so there! Gotcha! Oh, I'm feeling good. Just got out of an endlessly long faculty meeting where we had a good, old fashioned brawl over one of my favorite subjects. No, not just a brawl, a saloon fight. Complete with breaking glass, hurled chairs and fisticuffs. And I got in a few good blows before the sheriff had to break it up. "Mack! A round of whiskey for my friends." Graduate program, indeed. Humph!Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, as I have my dander up. Maybe nobody threw a punch, and no-one was propelled out of a window. But it did devolve to some choice name-calling – "Big nose" and such. Well, so I do have a big nose, and I'm proud of it.We're fighting, yet again, about the graduate program. And it put me in mind of one of the great verbal duels in the history of theater, where long noses and great principles won the day. You know the one, by Edmond Rostand, where Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac bests his foes in a war of words, to the delight of the audience, and long-nosed insectivores everywhere. And that story has something to do with how I feel about teaching graduate students. (If you don't know Cyrano de Bergerac, go rent the DVD of the classic José Ferrer version or, failing that, Roxanne by Steve Martin, which will do at a pinch.)I've said it before and I'll say it again: science is hard. Our job training graduate students (and yours, if you are a graduate student) is to prepare for how hard it is. A student who is going to be successful needs to emerge from training with the tools, technical and intellectual, to be a scientist in the big, big world. They must know how to take a question and turn it into a series of experiments that show something interesting, which they will write up, submit, rework, rewrite, resubmit and publish. Our graduate programs are meant to teach them to do this.Graduate programs used to go like this. The student, fresh out of undergraduate education, and with little real science experience, would receive rigorous course training to prepare for the real intellectual training, which involved massive immersion in the literature, on which they would be tested. Generally this took the form of candidacy exams, written and oral, that one could (and often did) fail – albeit with a chance of trying again (sometimes). This was the second scariest thing the student had to do (the scariest being defending) – not scary, terrifying!So terrifying, in fact, that I remember mine in detail, even though it was hundreds of years (okay, publications) ago. I wrote answers to three questions, providing historical background and experimental bases for the conclusions, referencing relevant papers by corresponding author and year. Six hours to complete, and no notes. Followed by a four-hour oral exam to defend my answers (fortunately, I wore a t-shirt that said "Stupid" so they were kind). I passed. But I'm shaking just remembering it.No way I could have done this with my coursework alone. I read hundreds and hundreds of papers and attended innumerable study groups to prepare. And yes, my mentor expected me to be in the lab, doing experiments, of course.When I left the oral exam, shaken, my famous professor, Professor Rat, shook my hand, and told me that the time may come when I would know a lot more about my particular field (as he did), but right then I knew even more general biology than he. So while I did rush out for cocktails, I did so several feet off the ground. I wasn't a scientist yet, but I'd made the first step into a larger world."Mole!" you cry, "That was so then. Surely you don't do that to your students!" No, we don't. In our market-driven graduate programs, that would be impossible, right? Our students do a candidacy that is akin to the relationship between our friend Cyrano and his young protégé, Christian de Neuvillette, who he tutors in the art of romance, not only writing the love letters that Christian sends to their love interest, Roxane, but even reciting the words that Christian mouths to her from the shadows. Our students do a candidacy that involves writing a small proposal on a research project outside the scope of the immediate area of their lab work and present it to a committee. They do this by approaching a faculty member, not their supervisor, who gives them: (a) the project to present, (b) the experiments they'll propose, and (c) most of the literature they'll need to read, reformat and regurgitate. In effect, the advisor writes it for the student, who stands before the committee, mouthing the words (and turning back to the advisor if the questions get tough). They all pass. The program is very popular. Perhaps a lot like yours.We do this, I think, because in fact we don't care. It's what the students want, and we convince ourselves (all of us) that it's all they need. For many faculty, this has the advantage that the students have more time for working on our projects, which is why we want to have a graduate program anyway. Teaching students to be better prepared to someday be better, independent scientists doesn't help us, the faculty, in the short term (or maybe ever), so why bother. Especially if the students would hate us if we made it tougher.But it ended badly for Cyrano, if you'll recall. If I'd been given the option to do an exam like this, way back then, I would definitely have gone for the easy way. If you'd asked me (they didn't), I'd have said that the preparation they expected of me was impossible and cruel. I couldn't have done it until I did. I'm glad they didn't ask me. I think we're selling our students short.So I'm old fashioned. I want to be harder on students, believing as I do that ultimately they'll thank me for it (but not in the short term). I know that just because I had to go through it doesn't make it right, or better, except that it is. It worked for me, and it could work again. I'm a better scientist as a consequence. Wanna fight about it?

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