Category Archives: Academia

How to track the “lost generation” of scientists

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“We should not consider it a disaster that someone trained to a high level doesn’t remain in academia,” Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, president of the European Research Council, told a panel discussion about science’s “lost generation” last month.

In this podcast Bourguignon and two of his fellow panel members  tell Julie Gould how better career tracking data from universities and other institutions would show how few achieve staff positions, challenging the perception that academia is the only worthwhile career option.

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University drops test scores from graduate-admissions criteria

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PhD students have led a successful push for greater inclusivity of under-represented groups in science, technology, engineering and maths.

{credit}Cody Anthony Hernandez{/credit}

Above, GRIT co-founders Cody Hernandez, Christina Roman, and Mat Perez-Neut, PhD students at the University of Chicago in Illinois, take a break.

By Kendall Powell

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Done is better than perfect: overcoming PhD perfectionism

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The most important thing a PhD will teach you is how and when to stop.

By Atma Ivancevic

Sometimes ‘OK’ is OK enough

I submitted my PhD thesis on the evolution of jumping genes in December 2016, four days before Christmas. It wasn’t perfect — in many ways, it wasn’t even good. By the end of my graduate studies, I had hoped to be a proficient programmer and an established scientist with multiple high impact papers. At the bare minimum, I expected to find evidence to support my hypothesis. Instead, my thesis was largely unpublished, my coding was preliminary, and my results were inconclusive. In my eyes, it was a failure. Continue reading →

Lowering the stakes on exams could help close the gender gap in STEM classes

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Women tend to underperform in introductory STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses, but tweaking how courses are graded could help change that.

By Diana Crow

In many undergrad STEM courses, high-stakes exams — such as mid-terms and finals — determine as much as 60-70% of the student’s overall grade. However, this emphasis on tests may be inadvertently putting some students at a disadvantage.

An emphasis on high-stakes exams at undergraduate level may be a contributor to the gender gap

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How could universities and funders improve the situation for postdoctoral scientists?

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What the research system needs to be doing to improve the world that postdocs face

By David Bogle

I’ve already written about how PhDs can prepare for and decide whether or not they should pursue a postdoc. Here, I will discuss what more universities and funding agencies should be doing as stakeholders in training and employing researchers.

Universities must be doing more to ensure the postgraduate experience is a positive one

Employers, both at universities and elsewhere, need a range of sophisticated research skills at their institutions. Early career researchers have already shown themselves to be incredibly talented; and society needs them to drive innovation in the economy. This is all the more important in the context of an ongoing war for talent. Researchers must have the opportunity to develop as ‘creative critical autonomous intellectual risk takers’ for the sake of society. Continue reading →

The million-dollar question every scientist should be asking

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Both science communicators and researchers carry the onus of answering science’s most important question

By Jessica Eise

I recently had a phone call with a frustrated colleague looking for some advice. She had two key pressure points, both common in the field of science communication.

First, she often couldn’t make sense of what scientists were telling her. They would explain their advanced, varied concepts increasingly quickly and impatiently as she struggled to understand them. Both parties would leave frustrated, having not achieved much. The scientists might wrongly assume she’s stupid to have not understood.

Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy asked “What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?” To communicate effectively, scientists should simply ask “So what?”{credit}By IllusionConscious [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons {/credit}

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How to mentor undergraduates as a postgraduate, and why it’s important

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Spending more time mentoring undergraduates as a postgrad is good for everyone, says Jenn Summers.

To-do lists work for some, but a more holistic approach to researcher development may bring larger rewards.{credit}By FOTO:Fortepan — ID 2278: Adományozó/Donor: Unknown. [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons{/credit}

There’s a difference between mentoring and doling out to-do lists. This is something I’ve learned over the past year, my first as a mentor. Mentoring undergrads became part of my job only recently – in the past, research came first. Most advisors value research outcomes over mentoring, and departments certainly place more value on publications. Before this past year, I was used to just a single undergrad working in my lab, and I thought of them as worker bees, not as future colleagues.

Put simply: I did not think about teaching in the lab.

Now, after guidance from recent research on mentoring, I realize that if graduate students like myself were more invested in mentoring, there would be many more small-but-important teaching opportunities.

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Resubmitting your study to a new journal could become easier

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Rejected manuscripts are a fact of life in science, but a new initiative might take some of the sting out of the process.

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{credit}Image credit: Getty Images/Mateusz Zagorski{/credit}

By Chris Woolston

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a Baltimore, Maryland-based non-profit that promotes standardization in publishing, has embraced a plan to make it easier for journals to share rejected manuscripts and manuscript reviews without forcing authors to go through another arduous submission process. Continue reading →

Why learning to mentor and teach is more important for US faculty members than publishing papers

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An influential ally aims to reform the experience of US PhD students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by advocating for a system that rewards faculty members for mentoring and advising students rather than for their own publications.

 

By Chris Woolston

In a 29 May report , Graduate STEM Education for the 20th Century, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) in Washington DC calls for providing faculty members with incentives for developing skills such as teaching and mentoring while de-emphasizing the importance of publications. The report recommends that institutions change their promotion and tenure policies and practices to recognise and reward faculty members’ contributions to graduate mentoring and education.

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