contributors Yuriy Baglaenko and Eric Gracey
Students from the department of immunology at the University of Toronto recently completed a survey of their 288 alumni, tracking their career choices and progressions through life. In this post, Yuriy Baglaenko and Eric Gracey ask the alumni what they have done after leaving the University of Toronto, and which skills they learned there have come in useful in their careers.
As graduate students, we are both the consumers of education and the producers of knowledge, and the success of universities depends on the research we produce. Many university ranking systems disproportionately value research impact: the Time’s Higher Education University rankings has 30% of the ranking composed of publication citation impact and an additional 30% comprised of research volume, income and reputation. Yet, graduate students are considered trainees and by attending courses and conducting independent research, we are supposed to be preparing for the next chapters of our lives. In a recent survey from the Department of Immunology at the University of Toronto, we asked our 288 alumni to evaluate the effectiveness of that training.
In a previous NatureJobs blog post, we summarized the vocation and location trends uncovered in this survey. In this post, we ask how well graduate training the University of Toronto immunology department prepared our alumni for their chosen careers and pass along some of the comments that emerged.
{credit}Yi-Min Chun{/credit}