No More Graduate Students
Jun 6, 2010
What if there were no more graduate students? The students in your lab would be there forever.
What else would you teach them?
If the goal is to no longer ‘get you a publication’ or to ‘get you out of here’… how would you measure their success?
Posted by Sean |
Categories: Scientific Publication and Presentation | Tagged: Graduate School, Scientific Publication and Presentation |
Kyle
July 1st, 2010 at 3:26 PM #
I’m not entirely sure I see the logic of your premise–if there were no more graduate students then what students are you referring to who would “be there forever”? Sort of technicians with tenure?
I guess you are defining a graduate student as someone with certain benchmarks to meet…or a graduate education as the accumulation of these benchmarks. Stripped of arbitrary naming and sets of requirements, I don’t know how much would really change. Presumably the mentee/apprentice (can’t say grad student!) still wants to gain expertise in one or several methodologies, to formulate and solve problems, to become an effective writer or speaker, etc. It’s up to the mentor to encourage this professional development while embarking on his/her chosen avenue of research (and the good ones do)–I don’t really think employment structure has much to do with it. Science is science,and whether there are people called graduate students involved is not an existential problem for the scientific enterprise.
I think the biggest change would be in the details of employment in academia, not in what people learn or how their success is measured. You suggest that the students would be there forever, but there would still be funding matters, contractual issues (since you’re now dealing with workers and not students), competing job offers, etc. Scientists would have to adapt their HR tactics but I don’t think there would be a sea change in the day-to-day workings of science.
Sean
July 7th, 2010 at 12:14 PM #
Hi Kyle – thanks for the insights.
The ‘be there forever’ point is to address the fact that labs would become overfilled if new students joined and no one left. I consider a graduate student to be quite different than a technician with tenure. A technician’s major focus is not pursuing a degree unlike a graduate student.
If the relationship between a student and adviser is going well then I agree that not much would change. I fear that this is not always the case and see this as an area for improvement.
Kyle
July 7th, 2010 at 5:42 PM #
Sean,
I agree with the distinction you are making. I have been a technician and I’m now a graduate student, and while I’m doing grad school because I enjoy being in science I also wanted to use my work for significant professional advancement. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a fact that an advanced degree is required to get ahead in science on any career track: academia, industry, even publishing.
When I was considering your original question, it wasn’t obvious whether the awarding of a degree was also being ruled out. You only stated that there would be no more grad students, not “no more PhDs”.
As far as the student-advisor relationship, there’s grounds for a huge amount of debate on that issue. Every so often I see an editorial in one of the major journals that addresses the issue of how to properly train grad students–what kind of project, what kind of lab environment, etc. You may want to check out this one, for example: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5955/916?rss=1.