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An Experiment That Didn’t Work

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My first week in the lab, my boss plopped a book with the bold title Ignorance: How it Drives Science. And now, as I wrap up writing my dissertation, she has given me its sequel, Failure: Why Science Is So Successful. Preternatural optimist that she is, she did not gift these books out of pessimism or wry passive aggression. Rather, she believed they contained important lessons. Lessons that perfectly bookend my Ph.D. career.

My time in the lab began with ignorance—not the wide-eyed, first-year graduate student variety, but the rigorous brand that embraces an open question. A great conundrum in modern biology is how life’s great diversity stems from four letters—A, C, G, and T—arranged in a near-infinite array to compose life’s blueprint molecule: DNA. Now, consider that every cell in your body contains the exact same complement of DNA. Yet a heart cell looks and acts completely different from a brain cell which looks and acts completely different from a skin cell. So how did a heart cell, a brain cell, and a skin cell arrive at such different biological fates when given the exact same set of molecular blueprints?

Science PhDs lead to enjoyable jobs

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As universities around the world award science PhDs at an ever-increasing rate, some doctoral students might wonder whether the degree is still worth all the time, effort and sacrifice.

But two recent projects tracking the journeys of PhD holders in the United Kingdom and Canada offer reason for optimism: graduates in the sciences and other fields are highly employable, even if they don’t always end up where they expected. “There’s a lot of pessimism about an oversupply of PhDs,” says Sally Hancock, an education researcher at the University of York, UK, who led the study in her nation — one of only a few of its kind worldwide. “These data can help demystify what happens next.”

New study says graduate students’ mental health is a “crisis”

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Several studies suggest that graduate students are at greater risk for mental health issues than those in the general population. This is largely due to social isolation, the often abstract nature of the work and feelings of inadequacy — not to mention the slim tenure-track job market. But a new study in Nature Biotechnology warns, in no uncertain terms, of a mental health “crisis” in graduate education.

Coming out in STEM: Factors affecting retention of sexual minority STEM students

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Using a national longitudinal survey data set from the Higher Education Research Institute, this study tested whether students who identified as a sexual minority (for example, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer) were more or less likely to persist after 4 years in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, as opposed to switching to a non-STEM program, compared to their heterosexual peers. A multilevel regression model controlling for various experiences and characteristics previously determined to predict retention in STEM demonstrated that, net of these variables, sexual minority students were 8% less likely to be retained in STEM compared to switching into a non-STEM program. Despite this finding, sexual minority STEM students were more likely to report participating in undergraduate research programs, and the gender disparity in STEM retention appears to be reversed for sexual minority STEM students.

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Contact

Ahna Skop, PhD, DSc
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2426 Genetics
Madison, WI 53706
608-263-1593
skop@wisc.edu

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