Professional Skills in Graduate School and Beyond

All students supported by the training grant meet at 5 pm on the 2nd Thursday of each month to discuss a variety of professional development topics with faculty over pizza.  Examples of recent topics and associated resources are shown below. 

Date Topic Reading and Resources
December 2023    
November 2023 Reproducible Research
October 2023 Choosing a rotation mentor
September 2023    
August 2023    
July 2023    
June 2023 Update on Student Developed Symposium  
May 2023 Polly Fordyce “How academic funding works”
April 2023 Yearly Planning Meetings: Individualized Development Plans Aren’t Just More Paperwork  
March 2023 Planning for Student Developed Symposium  
Feb. 2023 Planning for Student Developed Symposium  
Jan. 2023 Initial planning for Student Developed Symposium  
Dec. 2022 Paper controversies, corrections, and authorship
Nov. 2022 Keeping up with scientific literature
Oct. 2022 Information resources when considering thesis labs
  • Ben Barres essay on importance of mentoring record, as well as research projects in faculty labs
  • Faculty websites (including lab alumni and outcomes).
  • Stanford Profiles that list both current PhD students as well as teaching and advising committees of faculty (search by faculty name, then look  under “Teaching” tab)
  • NIH and NSF databases of current and past federal funding, searchable by faculty name
May 2021 Student feedback, suggestions, and GENETICSDEVBIO_T32 research day planning
Apr. 2021 What can you do with your science PhD? (discussion and examples with Genetics & DevBio training program alumni Yuya Kobayashi and Kyle Gurley ) 
Mar. 2021

Scientific, social, and ethical aspects of human-nonhuman chimeras

(discussion with Hiromitsu Nakauchi)

Feb. 2021 Rigor, bias, authorship, and funding debate following Stanford COVID seroprevalence study
Jan. 2021 Ethics of vaccine challenge trials
Dec. 2020 Why do some fields (and projects) make more progress than others?
Nov. 2020 How to pick a graduate advisor
Oct. 2020 Being a successful graduate student in the sciences
May 2020

Jason Buenrostro:   Alumni, Harvard 

Apr. 2020

 

What is a robust scientific result? 

 

Mar. 2020

Ethics and Urgency in Emerging Epidemics

Feb. 2020

Power analysis in design and interpretation of experiments

Jan. 2020

Extreme Biology

Dec. 2019

Should we sequence everything?

Nov. 2019

On becoming a better scientist

Oct. 2019

"Extreme Biology" planning

  • Symposium flyer, schedule, and website.

May 2019

Planning a scientific symposium

  • Topic and speaker discussion.

Apr. 2019

Authorship standards and case studies

Mar. 2019

Choosing a thesis lab

Feb. 2019

Maintaining laboratory notebooks

Dec. 2018

Ethics and human germline editing

Nov. 2018

Choosing a model organism

Oct. 2018

How to succeed in graduate school