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Communicating in Integrated Bioscience The design of this course will depend on the distribution of the student cohort for that particular year. Each participating student, with guidance from a faculty member in his/her department, will present some of the major tenets of his/her sub-discipline. This will include a presentation to the class, the distribution of selected publications that are appropriate to this diverse group of students (e.g., those drawn from Science, Nature, or similar journals), and will be followed by an open discussion of various questions raised by the selected articles. This is not simply a graduate student-run course. Contributing faculty will be present during every class to offer feedback to presenting students and to guide discussions non-intrusively. Graduate students will benefit by obtaining feedback on teaching subject matter in their field and learn what other students consider to be important in their respective fields.
The communications course will train the students how to communicate with colleagues outside their traditional discipline. Engineers will have to explain cornerstone research in engineering to chemists and biologists, for example. This will train the presenters how to communicate more effectively with a broad range of colleagues while simultaneously broadening the knowledge base of the audience. The latter will encourage students to “think outside the box” and will naturally lead to synergistic interactions among students that would be unlikely in a traditional Ph.D. Near the end of the communications course, students will be forming research groups to work on a project in the third core course (problem solving). Faculty appropriate to the students in the course will guide the students to choose a research project that can be conducted in a semester’s time, given the equipment available on campus. The students will then conduct their projects over the course of the next semester (Problem Solving in Integrated Bioscience). |
