Train PhD students to be thinkers not just specialists

Gundula Bosch
nature.com
Originally posted February 14, 2018

Under pressure to turn out productive lab members quickly, many PhD programmes in the biomedical sciences have shortened their courses, squeezing out opportunities for putting research into its wider context. Consequently, most PhD curricula are unlikely to nurture the big thinkers and creative problem-solvers that society needs.

That means students are taught every detail of a microbe’s life cycle but little about the life scientific. They need to be taught to recognize how errors can occur. Trainees should evaluate case studies derived from flawed real research, or use interdisciplinary detective games to find logical fallacies in the literature. Above all, students must be shown the scientific process as it is — with its limitations and potential pitfalls as well as its fun side, such as serendipitous discoveries and hilarious blunders.

This is exactly the gap that I am trying to fill at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where a new graduate science programme is entering its second year. Microbiologist Arturo Casadevall and I began pushing for reform in early 2015, citing the need to put the philosophy back into the doctorate of philosophy: that is, the ‘Ph’ back into the PhD.

The article is here.

Batgirl's Psychologist

By applying characters' fictional psyches to real-life problems, a cosplay enthusiast turned a passion for comic books into a mental-health career.

Erika Hayasaki
The Atlantic
Originally published January 27, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Despite her excellent credentials and high grades, she carried with her traces of imposter syndrome—the fear that colleagues would discover she wasn’t smart or talented enough to be in her position. It is an anxiety that many career-driven women who excel in their fields experience, as noted in a famous 1978 study in Psychotherapy Theory, Research, and Practice, in which observations of 150 highly successful women found that they often thought of themselves as frauds and did not “experience an internal sense of success.”

The entire article is here.