How is the class structured?

Students meet twice a week, like any other regular class. One class is specifically for giving progress updates. These progress updates center around a certain theme each week. For example, subject recruitment might be the focus one week, so students might talk about how they recruited subjects, and what information they provided to these people.

We tend to give each other feedback during progress updates days, and my colleague and I try to throw in different questions about situations that might occur, questions along the tangents of “If this doesn’t go well, what’s your plan B?” We try to talk about issues that might be relevant in students’ future research careers so that we prepare them to be able to tackle these sorts of issues when they get out of this class.

The other day has more of a workshop-feel, where my colleague and I go over methods used in actual research, such as statistics, programming, and scientific writing. For programming, the PI might expect you to be knowledgeable of basic commands of programming languages, so it’s really hard to find research opportunities without any programming experience. We hope that by incorporating these workshop-style classes, we prepare students for these future opportunities.