Professional Training
Regardless of what career a nascent scientist or engineer eventually pursues, they need to be strong communicators who are ethical decision makers capable of working with others. To help BU graduate students achieve these goals, they will participate in the extensive programming offered by BU’s Office of Professional Development and Postdoctoral Affairs (PDPA). The PDPA currently offers a professional development curriculum consisting of workshops and online modules that provide opportunities for graduate students to build and develop their skills relating to their individual career goals and training in areas of project management, leadership, communication, self-awareness, and career development. These resources help graduate students prepare for future careers through self-assessment and the creation of IDPs, as well as guidance for exploring potential career pathways in both academic and non-academic fields.
The PDPA recently developed “Ph.D. Progression,” a project that creates a digital-badge tracking platform and dashboard that allows graduate students to track their development of skills and their achievement of learning goals connected to seven core capacities (Career Development, Discipline Specific Knowledge, Research Skills, Management & Leadership, Self-Awareness, Communications Skills, and Teaching Skills). Through the acquisition of digital badges connected to the self-guided activities and assessments recorded on the platform, graduate students can monitor their progress through various learning pathways. Each badge is assessed and issued according to completion of specific tasks and learning pathways. The online dashboard allows students to organize, download, and share on other virtual platforms (e.g., LinkedIn) a summary of their achievements, providing a portfolio piece for job applications.
Trainees will also participate in a number of other workshops:
Communication
We will partner with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, one of the most well-respected programs on scientific communication in the world. Each year, 16 NRT Trainees and Affiliates will participate in the center’s signature two-day “Building Trust and Sharing Narratives” workshop, where their instructors will guide participants through improvisation exercises to help them connect with different types of audiences (scientific, lay, policy, etc.). In addition, the group will spend time reflecting upon lessons learned from improvisation exercises and will apply these skills to refine presentation of their work in a new and more engaging way. The use of improvisational techniques and other exercises will also strengthen relationships between participants, facilitating team-building and fostering collaboration.
Additional communications training will be provided throughout the program, via a combination of workshops and coaching offered by several BU resources, including the Communications Lab in the Biological Design Center (BDC), the College of Engineering, and PDPA. The BDC Communications Lab (“BDC Comm Lab”) trains graduate students and postdoctoral fellow coaches to help their peers improve their skills in oral presentation, writing, and visual design. Catalyzed by the NRT, the Comms Lab will develop additional programming in these three areas, including (1) workshops on how to develop effective pitches for one’s thesis project, writing an compelling manuscript introduction, preparing a graphical abstract, and (2) a team-based “hacking” competition where teams of students are provided with a complex data set and have a defined time period to generate a figure based on the data. The BDC Comm Lab will also provide one-on-one coaching in an “office hours” format for students looking for guidance on writing, presentation, and visual design. Students also have the option to take a grant-writing workshop that is offered annually by PDPA.
Ethics
Researchers in STEM fields have always had to grapple with important ethical questions, but the development of new techniques with relevance to biological control like CRISPR and gene editing has reinforced the need to prepare our students for complex, “beyond the bench” ethical questions that they may face in their careers. Consequently, the NRT program will provide two phases of ethics training. The first is the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training offered by BU. Five online modules (Introduction to the Responsible Conduct of Research, Data Management, Mentoring, Plagiarism, and Reproducibility) are followed by four, faculty-led, two-hour live discussions of case studies. The second phase involves partnering with the Scientific Citizenship Initiative (SCI), which aims to improve the quantity and quality of interactions between scientists and society by embedding skills and practical experience in scientific citizenship (ethics, communication, outreach, advocacy, governance, and leadership) within the training experience. Our partnership with SCI will involve a two-day interactive “nanocourse”, in which up to 30 NRT Trainees and Affiliates each year will learn about Governance and Ethics of Biotechnology via a module on Gene Drives. In addition to explicit ethics training, the nanocourses promote active listening and effective communication, and it will also strengthen the relationships between the participants, as many of the exercises are run in a small group format.
Teamwork
Organizations increasingly rely on teams to address complex challenges, but training of STEM graduate students in teamwork skills has lagged behind. In a recent employer survey commissioned by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, more than 80% of executives and hiring managers rated the ability of employees to work effectively on teams as “very important,” yet fewer than 50% rated recent college graduates well prepared to do so.
We will address this gap through training experiences distributed across all five years of our students’ PhD programs. The required NRT coursework, workshops, Biocontrol Challenge, co-mentoring of thesis research, and summer bootcamps are designed to strengthen students’ awareness of and competence in the skills required to create, participate in, and lead productive teams. Specifically, the two required NRT courses and bootcamps/workshops include learning outcomes on teamwork, and they will use pedagogical approaches and instruments recommended by the Center for Teaching & Learning at BU. These approaches include use of: case studies of well-functioning vs. dysfunctional teams; self-reflection before, during and after group assignments; designation of roles and rotation of those roles among team members; process documents for team members to collaboratively establish expectations and ways of working; and periodic graded assessments of team effectiveness. The teamwork aspects of the BDC Comm Lab workshops such as the team-based “graphics hacking” competition will augment these skills.
Internships
Trainees will complete one 12+-week summer internships between the second and third years of their PhD program. These internships can be in a broad range of professional fields, including industry (biotech, medtech, robotics), scientific communication and editorial work, science policy, and STEM education and outreach. We will use resources available through MassMEDIC, Mass Life Sciences Center, and MassBioEd, BU’s Industry Engagement Office, and our own networks, to identify other placement opportunities. An information session on internships will be held during the fall semester of their first year in the NRT. This session will include a panel discussion with students who have completed comparable internships and a presentation run jointly by the Program Coordinator and the BU Center for Career Development. The Program Coordinator will also meet with Trainees over the course of their second year, to help them identify potential internships.
Mentor Training
In addition to faculty mentor training, we will partner with the College of Engineering’s on their program for PhD mentor training. The program focuses on developing mentoring circles that pair 1st- and 2nd-year PhD students with multiple 3rd+ year student mentors. We will expand this program to bridge across the Colleges of Engineering and of Arts and Sciences, provide additional administrative staff, and work with the Newbury Center and professional societies to identify additional mentors.
Industry Engagement
Initiatives that help graduate students learn about innovation, entrepreneurship, and effective industry engagement can have a dramatic impact on their future careers, whether inside or outside academia. These initiatives are particularly important given that only a relatively small proportion of STEM PhD students go on to faculty positions. To help our students learn these skills, they will have the opportunity to participate in BDC SPIN (Student Program for Industry Networking), a student-organized mentoring program that prepares students for an academia-to-industry transition during graduate school by connecting them to mentors who have navigated the industry landscape and successfully transitioned to it from academia. Our students will also have an opportunity to join the leadership team of BDC SPIN to enhance their leadership skills and help them further expand their professional networks.
With support from:
NSF DGE #2244366
