Graduate students must often weigh the pros and cons of straying from an advisor’s research program
Guest contributor Carolyn Beans
Early in graduate school, I had total study system envy. In many biological fields, including my own field of evolutionary ecology, a study system is a specific species that a scientist uses to run tests. Some of these species like mice, zebrafish, and the plant Arabidopsis are model organisms, and have been well-studied for decades or more. Whether scientists choose a model organism or a relatively unknown species as a study system can have drastic consequences for their research.
Zebrafish{credit}Uri Manor, NICHD{/credit}