Understanding Graduate School Admissions, The Graduate Student Experience and Post-PhD Trajectories: Wellesley College 2016

Introduction<br>This STEM advising outreach program was developed for undergraduate students who are contemplating future applications to PhD programs in the life sciences. The audience of ~60 students ranged in academic stage, mostly pursuing research in neuroscience fields, in that summer’s cohort of students at Wellesley College. We have previously described our first outreach event covering these topics (ref. 1); this 90-minute combination of seminar and discussion built on that pilot program. This session was intended to complement the advising that students receive from their primary research mentors on campus. Although undergraduates at many excellent institutions have access to extensive pre-professional advising for careers in medicine, law and some other directions, the structure of advising for scientific research and the many career options that rely on PhD training is less consistent. Independent study or thesis research mentors are often a student’s primary source of advice. Therefore, this outreach program’s content was developed with a goal of demystifying PhD programs and the benefits that they provide. The topics covered included: (a) determining the key differences between programs, (b) understanding how PhD admissions works, (c) preparing an effective application, (d) proactive planning to strengthen one’s professional portfolio (internships, independent research, cultivating mentors), (e) key transferable skills that most students learn in graduate school, (f) what career streams are open to life science PhDs, and, (g) some national and institutional data on student career aspirations and outcomes (ref. 2). <br><br>Methods<br>The approach of bringing a faculty member and an administrative staff member who both have life science PhD training backgrounds was intentional. This allowed the program to portray different perspectives and experience to guide student career development, while offering credible witnesses to the types of experiences, skills and knowledge gained through PhD training. Central to the method of this outreach program is the willingness of graduate educators to meet the students on their own ground. In addition to recruiting prospective applicants to Harvard summer internships and PhD programs, the speakers made an explicit appeal to students to hone their professional portfolio proactively. By discussing important skills that undergraduates need to be competitive in admissions and the career workplace including acquiring training in statistics and programming, soliciting diverse mentorship, acquiring authentic research experiences/internships, conducting thesis research, and obtaining fellowships). By reinforcing much of the anecdotal and formal advising content that is made available by faculty mentors and career counselors, our host saw the value of external experts to validate guidance. In contrast to our first offering of this program for undergraduates, our session utilized a panel format at the end of presentation, in addition to interspersed Q&amp;A during the talk. In addition to the authors, a guest postdoc from HMS (who was aspiring to - and eventually attained - a faculty position) was also part of the panel. Our hosts were asked to prompt with questions that students might be curious to ask. The students received a meal, as the session was held at midday to avoid conflicts with other academic or extracurricular events. <br><br>Results<br>As the principal goal of the session was to encourage and engage students, not to test them, and the students ranged widely in stage and long-term career objectives, there were no assessment surveys of learning gains. Informally, student engagement was excellent as judged by the frequency and thoughtful nature of questions asked during the discussion phase of the session. Ad hoc student feedback directly following the event was extremely positive, as was our host’s follow up by email after the event.<br><br>Discussion<br>This advising session was a refinement of our prototype, and thus served to prepare us for a series of similar events across a larger network of colleges. Our decision to incorporate a current research postdoc in the panel was very helpful, and also brought some gender balance. Each panelist had pursued their PhD training in a different institutional setting (UCLA, Tufts University, University of Wisconsin, Madison), thus providing a more diverse set of prior experiences and programmatic structures, in addition to information on the life sciences programs available at Harvard.<br><br>