2000 Annual Spring Meeting

The Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs (ANDP) held their annual Spring Meeting May 6-8, 2000 at the Georgetown University Conference Center. New to the meeting was a workshop planned, organized and presented by the inaugural class of ANDP Training Fellows entitled “The Trainee’s Perspective”. The workshop addressed issues in graduate and postdoctoral training including how students choose a graduate program, professional development training opportunities, irregularities in postdoctoral salary and benefits, and the invisibility of postdoctoral fellows. Alison Hall, chair of the ANDP Training Fellows program, opened the workshop by describing the goals of the Training Fellows program and outlining the activities of the Training Fellows during the past year. The activities included a leadership interview with their program director, designing and distributing a questionnaire to students and postdocs, and organizing the 2000 Spring Meeting workshop.

Laura Stone, a postdoctoral fellow at the Vollum Institute of the Oregon Health Sciences University, introduced the workshop and described how the activities of the Training Fellows over the past year culminated in the topics of the workshop. She discussed how the workshop evolved out of both the leadership interviews and the results of the questionnaire administered to peers at 6 institutions, with approximately 80 responses. Stone focused on how the Training Fellows used these two experiences to identify issues of concern to both trainees and program directors.

From the leadership interviews, the Training Fellows learned that program directors were very interested in how students choose a graduate program. Anne Baldwin, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discussed many facets of a student’s decision to choose a graduate program. The primary resource students utilize is the World Wide Web. Baldwin provided tips on how to improve a program’s presence on the web, from the departments web page to the importance of keywords and descriptions. The ultimate decision-maker for a prospective student, however, is the “gut reaction”. Baldwin discussed how an effective recruitment weekend could sway that “gut” feeling. Respondents to the Training Fellow’s questionnaire indicated they desired greater training in professional skills as a component of their graduate education. In particular, students desired additional training in teaching and communication skills such as grant writing as well as exposure to applied skills including business principles and technology transfer. Anita McCauley, a graduate student at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, described many different approaches being utilized by universities across the country to implement these types of training experiences into graduate education. McCauley also emphasized the need to talk to graduate students so that professional development resources could be implemented that best fit faculty as well as student interests. The Training Fellows workshop also focused on important issues in postdoctoral training. Annette Gilchrist, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, addressed inequities in postdoctoral employment. She indicated many of these inequities arise due to disparities in job classification and position titles. With each job title for a postdoctoral fellow comes a unique set of guidelines for salary and benefits. As a result, postdoctoral fellows in the same lab with similar training can have very different salaries and benefits, which can be very demoralizing Gilchrist said. She emphasized the need for postdoctoral training committees to evaluate postdoctoral training experiences and equity issue as well as to balance the needs of the postdoctoral fellow with those of the principal investigator.

Concerns about postdoctoral training extend beyond job classification and employment status. Benjamin Walker, postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University Medical Center, said that in many institutions postdoctoral fellows are “invisible”. They are viewed as the property of the PI and therefore ignored by both the department and the institution. The result is an inability to identify postdoctoral fellows within and across programs, limiting opportunities for networking and research collaborations. Because postdoctoral fellows are largely invisible, the additional training they need to successfully advance in their career is left up to the PI. Walker indicated that postdoctoral fellows and their respective programs would be better served if professional skills’ training, such as how to give a job talk, was a collaborative effort provided by many faculty members. He also suggested establishing a postdoctoral listserv and a postdoc organization to provide regular communication and a sense of community to postdoctoral fellows. In addition to the presentations given by each Training Fellow, two outside speakers were invited to share their perspectives on graduate and postdoctoral training. Dr. Teresa Sullivan, the Vice President and Graduate Dean of the University of Texas-Austin described the professional development program instituted for graduate students at the University of Texas. Dr. Eliene Augenbraun, Vice President and CEO of ScienCentral, Inc., described her experiences in establishing a postdoctoral training program at Johns Hopkins University. 

Submitted by Anita McCauley, 1999-2000 ANDP Training Fellow

1999-2000 ANDP Fellows' PowerPoint Presentation

TRAINING FELLOWS PHOTO

(Left to right): Anne Baldwin, Univ. Wisconsin (Madison); Annette Gilchrist, Ph.D., Northwestern Univ.; Anita McCauley, Wake Forest Univ.; Laura Stone, Ph.D., Vollum Institute of Oregon Health Sciences Univ.; Alison Hall, Ph.D., ANDP Adviser to Trainees, Case Western Reserve Univ.; Benjamin R. Walker, Ph.D., Georgetown Univ.