Welcome!!!! If you have just joined our developmental integrative biology group, welcome! We hope tenure here will be rewarding and enjoyable. If, however, you are considering attending UNT as a research student in our DPGR group, we would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
In either case, this statement of our Philosophy, Goals, and Expectations will give you a good idea of what to expect from the mentoring faculty - and what we will expect from you. We hope you find it interesting reading.
Sincerely,
The Participating Faculty,
(Warren Burggren, Ed Dzialowski, Jannon Fuchs, Ione Hunt von Herbing, Pudur Jagadeeswaran, and Pamela Padilla)
Objectives Of Our Research Group
Philosophy of Our Research Group
What We Expect From Our Students
1) Goals
2) Learning, training and grades
3) Cooperation
4)Your Schedule and Time Management
What You Can Expect From Your Mentor
1) Assistantships
2) Other financial and technical support
3) Moral support
4) Developing an exciting, creative research project
5) Gaining experience and confidence
6) Assistance in getting jobs or further educational opportunities.
1) Publication and Authorship Guidelines
2) Ownership of Data
Objectives of Our Research Group
The objectives of this research group are to: (1) produce high quality publications, theses and dissertations; (2) to train students who will be successful in their chosen careers, and; (3) to promote the study of developmental physiology and genetics through providing information, expertise, and leadership.
Philosophy of Our Research Group
Our mentoring style is based in part on the management philosophy of W. Edwards Deming, which focuses on: (1) constant improvement of quality, (2) management by leadership, not intimidation or blame, (3) cooperation, not competition, (4) training through involvement outside as well as inside the classroom/laboratory, and (5) promotion of pride of workmanship.
What We Expect From Our Students
Our laboratories comprise undergraduate students, graduate students, post doctoral fellows, and research associates. The following relates primarily to the graduate student experience. If you are reading this as an undergraduate, you will get a sense of what graduate school will be like. If you are reading this as a post doc or research associates, you can learn of the some of the expectations of you as a future or current mentor to students.
1) Goals
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Graduate Students. The goal of a Master's degree is to learn to do research. Further, your goal is to produce an original thesis of publishable quality in a reasonable time period (2 years). The goal of a Ph.D. degree is to learn how to do excellent research, and to be able to do so with increasing independence. Your goal is to produce a dissertation of original work and exceptional quality in a reasonable time period (4-5 years). An additional goal of both M.Sc. and Ph.D. students is to produce high quality journal publications from those theses/dissertations. Society has granted you a privileged position in which you can indulge your scientific interests - you can give back by sharing the wisdom you have learned.
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Undergraduate Students. The goal of an undergraduate carrying out Special Problems or Honors Research is to develop a first-hand understanding of how research is designed and conducted, and develop a sense of excitement and wonder that biologist hold regarding their research.. While learning by watching is important and may comprise your first hours or days in the lab, your time spent in a DPGR laboratory will be participatory rather than observational. You will participate in original research rather than laboratory exercises.
2) Learning, training, and grades
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Your training here will be a combination of laboratory experimentation and classes. Additionally, you will learn through interactions with fellow graduate students, colleagues at professional meetings, your research mentor, other professors, and teaching as a Teaching Assistant These experiences and interactions will help develop your leadership skills. Your courses will be selected to help you gain background for your thesis/dissertation research and to prepare you for your career.You must maintain at least a 3.0 GPA to maintain your teaching or research assistantship. While courses are important, your research and your dissertation are the most important part of graduate school. The objective is to learn, not to "get an A." Ultimately, you are not working for your mentor, or UNT, but rather for yourself.
3) Cooperation
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You are not in competition with your fellow graduate students, even if they are from another lab. When somebody from this research group gets recognition through a publication, grant, award, job, or the like, it reflects well on all of us. This philosophy also extends to the department, college, and university level. Therefore, cooperation and teamwork are going to be more productive than competition (although a little friendly competition can be healthy). Everyone in this research group will be expected to become familiar with everyone else's projects. We encourage students to collaborate and assist each other in various ways.
4) Your Schedule and Time Management
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We do not require set hours or amount of time spent at school. This is not a factory, and we don't have a time clock. Productivity at home or elsewhere can be valuable, although certain things are best accomplished at school, such as interacting with fellow students and your mentor and to cooperating on achieving goals in the laboratory. In particular, the leadership we expect from Ph.D. students is difficult to provide from a distance. We do expect to be able to reach you if we should need you on short notice. One of the greatest skills that a graduate student can acquire is that of effective time management. You will have to juggle research projects, courses, teaching, and a personal life. The most successful students learn to run these in parallel rather than in series. The latter is the most tempting, but in the long haul the former is the most efficient, and will best help you reach your personal and professional goals.
What You Can Expect From Your Mentor
1) Assistantships
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Unless there are unusual circumstances, we do not like to accept a student unless we can provide some financial support exists in the form of a Research or Teaching Assistantship. A research assistantship entails doing research, usually connected to the thesis/dissertation, for a monthly stipend. However, other duties may be assigned to you that are not directly related to your project. The amount of time you put in depends on what you are doing at the time. Again, we don't count hours and we don't expect you to either. The "job" is goal oriented. You put in the amount of time required to produce a quality thesis/dissertation. A teaching assistantship entails teaching several Biology course laboratory sections (3-6 contact hours per week) for your monthly stipend. Because the thesis/dissertation is still required, the research assistantship is generally preferred by most graduate students. However, there are a few advantages to a teaching assistantship. First, you gain teaching experience. Second, you often have more freedom in selecting your exact research project, since Research Assistantships are paid from grants, which entail some contractual obligations to the funding agency you may not have a choice; it often just depends on what is available at the time. Ultimately, the best financial solution may be a combination of teaching and research assistantships during your time at UNT.
2) Other Financial and Technical Support
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Our labs are relatively well funded, and we have been reasonably successful in obtaining extramural funding. Consequently, we have accumulated a fair amount of laboratory equipment that is available for you to use. There are numerous opportunities to obtain additional funding. These include in-house grants and fellowships, nationwide competitive grants, and others. We encourage all of our students to try their hand at obtaining funds through writing proposals and applications. If you eventually want to enter academia as a profession, it is essential to learn those skills. Ultimately, we expect you to work hard and prosper in our research group and accordingly we are responsible for ensuring that you have the equipment and supplies needed for your dissertation research.
3) Moral support
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Once you are in our research group, you will have our support. The idea is to be comfortable in your surroundings, without fear of failing, so you can focus on doing your best in your program.
4) Developing an exciting, creative research project
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As stated above, your research project will be the cornerstone of your graduate program . Professionally, you will be identified for some time to come by the project you work on and the publication(s) that come from it. You can expect to work on a project that is not just interesting but exciting. You should become familiar with the types of research we do in DPGR because your project is likely to be at least somewhat similar. We encourage you to make your project exciting by dreaming it up and then developing it yourself. Of course, the role of your research mentor (who is more experienced), is to guide your through this process. This creativity will have some constraints though. For example, if you are on a research assistantship, the funding probably comes from a grant with specific objectives. Usually, your project will be closely related to those objectives. However, you may not simply take a funded proposal that one of us has written and use that as your project. As stated above, an advantage to having a teaching assistantship is that you often have more freedom in developing your research project.
5) Gaining experience and confidence
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As you develop and conduct your research, you will gain experience and confidence in becoming an expert on your particular topic. You can expect to have opportunities to attend scientific meetings, present your research results there, and interact with other experts and potential employees/colleagues. Also, some of our current and future projects are large in scale and scope and often more than 1 graduate student will be working on these projects. Therefore, on these projects you can expect the opportunity to learn and gain experience in leadership skills, plus the opportunity/necessity to learn to cooperate with your fellow graduate student(s) in this regard. We view these as essential skills for professional biologists.
6) Assistance in getting jobs or further educational opportunities.
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The demonstrated success of our students in getting good jobs or further educational opportunities is one of the important yardsticks by which we judge the success of our program. You can expect your research mentor to provide contacts and information sources we have to help you in this regard. You can also count on a strongly favorable but honest reference to potential employers/mentors.
1) Publication and Authorship Guidelines
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Students often have questions about who is entitled to be an author on a publication. Usually, the question doesn't involve the first author so much as who will be added as co-authors. This question creates some of the most bitter arguments in science, but they are usually avoidable if everybody knows the ground rules beforehand. Although, each case is different, there are some simple guidelines. A nice treatment of this was laid out decades ago by Dickson and Conner (1978. Wildl. Soc. Bull. 6:260-261), and it still holds up to the test of time. They identified 5 components to preparing a scientific paper: (1) coming up with the original idea, (2) designing the study, (3) collecting the data, (4) analyzing the data, and (5) preparing the manuscript. In brief, anyone who contributes substantially to 2 or more of these 5 areas is entitled to be an author on the paper. Note, then, that several of our DPGR Recent Publications involving members of a collaborative project have numerous authors. Generally, a student's thesis/dissertation topic will be their own and will be authored by the student (first author) and the research mentor (second author), provided that the mentor has met the above requirements. This is generally the case because the research mentor almost always contribute substantially to components 1, 2, and 5 above.
2) Ownership of Data
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This is another topic that can cause conflicts that should really be easily avoided. Technically, if you are employed by UNT as a graduate assistant or even a technician while you are collecting and analyzing your data, then those data belong to the university under your research mentor's auspices. Actually, if funded by an outside source, then they really belong to that source (e.g., National Science Foundation or NIH). But usually the funding source identifies the university as the repository for the data. All this notwithstanding, in these days of easily copied electronic data, both graduate student and professor usually end up with a copy of the data collected by the graduate student, and you will almost always be free to work on it and publish from it after you leave here.
*This document, though customized to reflect UNT policies and specific thoughts of our Research Group, was originally conceived of by Dr. Robert Cooper, Warnell School of Forest Services, University of Georgia, who has granted us permission to reproduce his ideas on our DPGR web site. His similarity of thoughts on graduate education are reflected in the fact that we felt free to ask - and he freely granted - permission to use his creative efforts.