stanford advance: a novel program for transitioning phd students to graduate school
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Stanford ADVANCE: A Novel Program for Transitioning PhD Students to Graduate School. Laura Sanman , Rhea Richardson , Vanessa Burns , Lilian Lam, Benjamin Naecker, Terry Reyes, Alex Scharr, Tiffany Williams, Laleh Rongere, Anthony Ricci, Terrance Mayes - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
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Stanford ADVANCE: A Novel Program for Transitioning PhD Students to Graduate SchoolLaura Sanman, Rhea Richardson, Vanessa Burns, Lilian Lam, Benjamin Naecker, Terry Reyes, Alex Scharr, Tiffany Williams, Laleh Rongere, Anthony Ricci, Terrance Mayes
Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford CA
Summary
Future Directions
Acknowledgements
Program Structure
Funding: Office of Graduate EducationStanford Biosciences Biochemistry, Bioengineering, Biology, BMI, Biophysics, Neurosciences, and Stem Cell Home ProgramsSupport: Stanford Biosciences Student Association (SBSA)Biomedical Association for the Interest of Minority Students (BioAIMS)Office of Graduate Education (OGE)Daniel HerschlagProgram Leaders and AidesPrincipal Investigators that took ADVANCE StudentsPostdoctoral mentorsPanelists
Logistical: Point person within each Biosciences Home ProgramProgrammatic:Expand upon transition to graduate school programmingKey career programming towards a more interactive formatCollect longitudinal information regarding success of participants – including retention, fellowship awarded, time to degree
Office of Graduate Education
Administrators
Graduate StudentProgram Leaders
ADVANCEStudents
Postdoctoral Mentors
(Journal Club)
SBSA/BioAIMS,Biosciences Community
Programmatic DecisionsInformal Mentoring
Community
Building
AcademicDevelopmen
t
Academic Development
Participant Demographics
Programmatic Assessment
Academic, Social, and Career Development Metrics
2013 Program OutcomesAbstractBackground:A major challenge that students face when transitioning to research-based PhD programs is that graduate education comes with a completely different set of expectations than that of undergraduate education. In addition, students entering PhD programs often have different socioeconomic, academic, and ethnic backgrounds, making it difficult to prepare universally effective programming to ease the transition to graduate school. The Stanford Bioscience ADVANCE Summer Institute was created to address this unique challenge. ADVANCE is a collaborative effort to ease the transition to graduate school for Biosciences PhD students, with a focus on those with diverse backgrounds. The specific goals of ADVANCE are to foster community, academic excellence, and career readiness in an interactive learning environment. To achieve these goals, we held social events, panel discussions on careers and campus resources, workshops on scientific presentation and grant writing, and provided students with postdoctoral, faculty, and student mentors. We hypothesized that this program would improve student confidence, facilitate graduate and post-graduate career planning, and promote academic success. We further hypothesized that student feedback would facilitate future event planning for PhD students.Methods:We chose to measure the success of ADVANCE through surveys and personal dialogue. Surveys were collected before and after the ADVANCE program and after each event. Students reported self-confidence, readiness, awareness of resources, and effectiveness of each event. Academic success will be measured longitudinally by scoring time to degree, number of publications, and intellectual satisfaction.Results:Students reported overall increased confidence in their academic skill-set and preparedness for future endeavors. However, students reported dissatisfaction with career panels due to perceived applicability to older students and lack of intimacy. Notably, senior PhD students attending these panels did not share this dissatisfaction.Conclusions:The inaugural year of the Stanford ADVANCE Summer Institute met its goals of fostering community and building academic skills. It also identified needs of students in different stages of their PhD; incoming students benefited from skill- and community-building exercises while older students benefited from career advice. In future years, we will provide more interactive discussions, especially regarding career planning. We hypothesize that this will increase overall reported satisfaction with and effectiveness of ADVANCE.
GoalsIncrease the socio-economic, racial, sexual-orientation, and gender diversity of the graduate student population
Foster community, academic excellence, and career readiness within the incoming graduate students
Increase faculty confidence in admitting students from diverse backgrounds
Provide leadership opportunities for current graduate students
ADVANCE recruited and benefited a diverse population of studentsThere was a consistently general increase in academic preparedness for amongst participantsThere was a higher level of social inclusion and satisfaction amongst participantsNoted dissatisfaction with career programming - perhaps due to differential needs of graduate students at different stages of their PhD
Community
Building
CareerDevelopment
AcademicDevelopme
nt
Teamwork Exercise
Happy Hours
Hiking Excursion
Imposter Syndrome Workshop
Faculty Panel
Strengths Quest Skills Assessment
Data Blitz
Grant Writing Workshop
Presenting Scientific Papers
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Post-Event Student Evaluation
Rating
28%
16%56%
Division of Time in Workshops
Community Build-ingProfessional DevelopmentAcademic De-velopment
Latino38%
Asian19%
Native American
6%
Unreported6%
African American
6%
White25%
Workshop Development and Evaluation
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Post-Graduate Planning
Pre-ADVANCE Post-ADVANCE
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ence
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Career Options
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20
4060
80
Graduate Career Planning
Pre-ADVANCE Post-ADVANCE
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Coursework
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Research Preparedness
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Oral Presentations
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Resource Awareness
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Goal Setting
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Time Management
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Male Female
Perc
ent
“I really feel like I am in a great position to start my program now. I have a lot of tools to think about what things to look out for in
my first year and continuing on through grad school and a post-grad career."
--ADVANCE fellow 2013
“Meeting students from other programs and getting
settled before classes begin. We were definitely
lucky to have this experience”--ADVANCE fellow 2013“I fully support the idea of the program and
wishI had something like this when I was a new
gradstudent”
--Stanford faculty member
LaboratoryMentors
Principal Investigators