Pharmaceutical Sciences Graduate Program, University of California, Irvine, California.
Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of California, Irvine, California.
Adv Physiol Educ. 2022 Mar 1;46(1):77-83. doi: 10.1152/advan.00145.2021. Epub 2021 Nov 18.
Graduate physiology programs strive to provide students with in-depth expertise in a particular academic discipline, often facilitating this process in the form of a departmental seminar course. Within the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California Irvine (UCI), students are required to attend a seminar course, most often designed as a journal club, each quarter until they are ready to graduate. While this format may work well in departments where research topics are closely related, it has historically been less successful in UCI's Department of Physiology and Biophysics, where wide-ranging interests make for little overlap in foundational knowledge, limiting meaningful engagement with the material or with peers in the class. In this paper, we describe a complementary approach of developing a syllabus around student interests and covering topics that are critical for student success but often omitted from graduate curricula, such as interview skills, grant writing, and scientific communication. Results from our preclass survey motivated this approach to the class, and our retrospective survey demonstrated the substantial differences in student engagement, enthusiasm, and perceived benefits of this course relative to the journal club style course. We hope that the success of our course may serve as an exemplar for strategies to engage students more effectively and provide critical training in diverse skillsets that will help students after graduation.
研究生生理学项目努力为学生提供特定学术学科的深入专业知识，通常以部门研讨会课程的形式促进这一过程。在加州大学欧文分校（UCI）生理学和生物物理学系，学生必须参加研讨会课程，通常设计为期刊俱乐部，每季度一次，直到他们准备毕业。虽然这种模式在研究课题密切相关的部门中可能效果很好，但在 UCI 的生理学和生物物理学系中，历史上效果较差，因为广泛的兴趣使得基础知识几乎没有重叠，限制了与材料或与班上同学的有意义的互动。在本文中，我们描述了一种围绕学生兴趣制定教学大纲的补充方法，并涵盖了对学生成功至关重要但通常从研究生课程中省略的主题，例如面试技巧、资助写作和科学交流。我们的课前调查结果推动了这种方法的实施，我们的回顾性调查表明，与期刊俱乐部式课程相比，学生的参与度、积极性和对本课程的感知收益有了显著差异。我们希望我们课程的成功可以作为一个范例，用于制定更有效地吸引学生的策略，并提供多样化技能的关键培训，这将有助于学生毕业后的发展。
