| Cover Story - Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Reinventing graduate education
New Stanford grant program aims to foster creativity, community in Ph.D. programs
by Arden Pennell
Sometimes Stanford University doctoral student Nick Weiler sees a completely new face in the hallway — only to realize the stranger is a student like him, he said.
Busy in separate labs or studying alone, neuroscience doctoral students often work in isolation, he said.
"If there aren't events scheduled or structured to lead people to interact, they often won't," fellow neuroscience student Nick Steinmetz said.
In a multidisciplinary field whose students and faculty are spread throughout the campus' sandstone-colored buildings, a sense of togetherness is tough to feel, he said.
But not anymore.
Weiler and Steinmetz won a $5,000 grant from the university this month to encourage community and intellectual exchange in their doctoral program. Theirs is one of seven grants awarded for the first time to student groups by Stanford's Office of the Vice Provost of Graduate Education. Dubbed SPICE, or Student Projects for Intellectual Community Enhancement, the awards are part of an effort kicked off this year to revamp graduate education.
Weiler and Steinmetz will spend the funds launching new programs, including a book club, movie series and lunch seminar where the students can break bread — and share insights. A student trying to unlock how the brain interprets the world — by knowing it sees a cat rather than a dog, for example — could present his research to peers studying brain-scan technology, Steinmetz said.
Also debuting next month are grants for faculty, called Strengthening the Core or SCORE, to encourage students to be risk-takers or even change doctoral requirements.
The grants are the graduate-education office's first major undertaking, according to Chris Golde, an associate vice provost for the office, which was founded in January 2007.
Prompted by a study that uncovered deeply rooted problems with graduate education, Golde worked last year with Patricia Gumport, the university's vice provost for graduate education, to found the SPICE and SCORE grants.
The lofty ideal students have of graduate education frequently doesn't match reality, Golde said.
"They have this vision that's it going to be full of ideas and this vibrant intellectual experience," preparing them to lead their field forward, she said.
Instead, students arrive to a place where many are immersed in their own work.
"Too often, students say you can hear a pin drop in the hallways, or doors are shut because faculty members are at home working or jet-setting around the world," she said.
Even programs meant to foster dialog, such as a talk from a renowned scholar, can fall short, she said.
"The only people who talk are senior faculty members who use it as occasion to hash out old arguments, so it's about showing off and looking smart — not engaging with the speaker," she said. Students with questions can't get a word in edgewise — or are too intimidated to try, she said.
And Golde would know.
She helped lead a sweeping study of doctoral education conducted from 2002 to 2005 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a nonprofit think-tank headquartered at Stanford.
The foundation surveyed 84 departments at four universities for its Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate study.
Among the problems uncovered by the study was a lack of environments that create community and encourage risk-taking, Golde said in a March talk about findings.
Professors were often unaware of dissatisfaction from students who wanted to share ideas or try new methods, yet feared failing in the eyes of powerful thesis advisors or department supervisors, she said.
At the heart of problems was a lack of self-reflection, according to Laura Jones, a Stanford archaeologist and anthropologist who worked on the study.
Most programs operated purely based on examples from the past, both good and bad, she said at the March talk at Carnegie.
Professors remembered a good mentor or strove not to repeat mistakes from their own grad-school experience, she said. But truly reflective approaches — and therefore opportunities for change — were rare.
"The natives are in fact not fully aware of the system in which they are living," she quipped.
Michael Beattie, chair of the neuroscience department at Ohio State at the time of the survey, said the survey forced his department to realize it hadn't even defined what a good neuroscientist is. Department members realized it was time to take a step back and define goals — and how to get there, he said.
The gulf between accomplished scholars and students toiling at their desks is not as wide as it seems, according to Bryn Williams, a fifth-year doctoral student in the anthropology department.
He's going to use his $3,900 SPICE grant to help narrow it, he said.
Like Golde, he's been to formal talks where brilliant scholars share insights — and students sitting in the audience wonder how they'll make it to the podium one day.
He plans to dial down the formality of polished lectures and give students a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the research process with a new Stanford Archaeology Forum, he said.
The weekly forum will allow Stanford students — and visiting scholars and professors — to present works-in-progress and get feedback, workshop-style, he said.
It has equal time budgeted for the speaker and for discussion, at half an hour each.
Unlike in formal talks, students needn't be afraid of pointed, unhelpful criticism of their ideas, he said. Rather, the talks aim to show that brilliance begins messy.
"Everybody has bad ideas," he said. Students need to see the "seedy underbelly of academic research," the trials and setbacks, to feel as though they can take risks and test different ideas, he said.
He'll also invite a celebrated author to speak once a month to students in a book seminar. But the author will speak about the process of making the book, not about its contents, he said.
At the heart of the forum, students will be able to learn from one another, he said on a recent afternoon in the Archaeology Center, which is shared by anthropology, classics and geological and environmental-sciences students.
He held up a squat, ceramic pot he'd dug out from a plot of earth near the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was a soy pot from an 18th-century Chinese fishing village, he said. In the student seminars, he could hear from students digging up ancient Roman villages and compare notes on their approach, he said.
Normally, students are in "constant consumption" mode, devouring knowledge, he said. They don't hear enough about how others tackle tricky tasks in their field. The research process matters as much as the product, he said.
Communication with peers will also help keep students from drowning in information, Weiler said. It would be a full-time job to keep up with the constant updates on neuroscience research, he said.
To cut down on that, he and Steinmetz will form a journal club, where students are each assigned a particular journal whose findings they monitor then summarize for peers.
One could argue that busy, frazzled graduate students might not be keen on finding time for workshops and clubs that sound like, well, more work.
But Steinmetz and Weiler used a survey to determine what students wanted, they said. About one third of neuroscience graduate students responded.
They liked the research-sharing talks best. The proposed alternative, a group debate that would've required lots of background reading, got a lukewarm response, Steinmetz said.
Plus, doctoral students go to school for Ph.D.s because they find their topics interesting — simply put, they enjoy the work, he said.
But just to ensure students come, Steinmetz and Weiler are scheduling most events at lunch and providing meals, he said.
In fact, food accounts for 90 percent of their budget, or $4,500 of the $5,000 grant, he said.
Williams agreed that food is an important lure. He budgeted for each event to have a catered lunch, he said.
But it's not just a few hungry Ph.D. candidates who stand to benefit from improvement to doctoral education — or suffer at its faults, according to Lee Shulman, Carnegie Foundation president.
Snarls in graduate education have major impacts throughout the system, he said in the March talk about the foundation's study of the doctorate.
"If you want to know what's wrong with undergraduate education, look to the Ph.D. programs that produce the teachers who teach them," he said.
The same goes for what's right with undergraduate programs, he said.
Some graduate departments at Stanford already have community-building efforts. Mathematics students meet daily for tea with snacks and chatting. And the neuroscience department holds monthly mixers.
But more could be done, particularly to foment intellectual creativity, Golde and others say.
It's starting now — Steinmetz and Weiler are scheduling student lunch talks to begin in May. Williams is contacting speakers for the weekly workshops, he said. And Gumport, of the graduate-education office, said professors who have won similar grants to rethink and enhance their departments will be announced in a few weeks.
Staff Writer Arden Pennell can be e-mailed at apennell@paweekly.com. | 
Send this story
Print this story
