Schedule

Institutional and Contact Information
First offered Spring Semester, 2006: One two-hour period per week
Julie Sandell, Ph.D., Course Director
Associate Professor and Vice Chairman
Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology
Boston University School of Medicine, R-1014
Boston, MA
Email: jsandell@bu.edu
Phone: 617-638-4142

Intended Students
This is a required course for all Anatomy & Neurobiology graduate students in the Spring term of their first year. The course is open to other graduate students (Master's or Doctoral students) in any year of their training.

Overall Goals
The overall goal of this course is to provide a formal opportunity to address two topics that until now have been left to the discretion of individual graduate advisors. The first is to provide students with training in some of the professional skills, outside of basic science, which they will need to become successful as teachers and researchers. The second is to provide a forum for discussions of research ethics in the specific context of the situations in which our students currently find themselves, and which they can anticipate along their chosen career path. This course is not intended to teach everything students need to know about these topics. We fully expect that much additional learning will occur once each student is in a laboratory setting, as they progress through the program. The overall goal of our graduate program is to transform students into colleagues, and this course is just the first step.

Format

1. This course is offered every year in the Spring semester.
   
   
2. This course consists of one 2 hour class per week for 13 weeks.
   
   
3. Each class includes one topic from Ethics, and one from Professional Skills, covered in the first and second hour, respectively.
   
   
4. Each topic is covered by a combination of presentation by the instructor, facilitated discussion, and feedback from the instructor and peers on work done by the students outside of class. In some cases, outside guests are invited to participate in the discussion.
   
   
5. There will be 3 formal assignments which will be graded by the instructor. Together with participation, these grades will form the basis for the overall course grade (see below).