University of North
DEVELOPMENTAL
PHYSIOLOGY AND GENETICS RESEARCH GROUP:
PHILOSOPHY, GOALS, AND EXPECTATIONS*
Welcome!!!! If you have just joined our Developmental Physiology and Genetics Research Group, welcome! We hope your tenure here will be rewarding and enjoyable. If, however, you are considering attending the University of North Texas as a research student in our DPGR group, we would be happy to answer any question you may have.
In either case, this statement of our Philosophy, Goals and Expectations will give you a pretty 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, Dane Crossley, Qunfeng Dong, Ed Dzialowski, Jannon Fuchs, Michael Hedrick, Ione Hunt von Herbing, Pudur Jagadeeswaran and Pamela
Padilla)
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
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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.
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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.
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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 (2-3 years). The goal of a Ph.D. degree is to learn how to do exceptional 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 publications in refereed journals from those theses/dissertations. Society has placed you in a privileged position in which you can indulge your scientific interests – the least you can do is share 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. We won't have you doing experiments that have been done before or of which we are completely confident in the outcome.
2) Learning, training and grades. –Your training here will be a combination of laboratory experimentation and graduate classes. Additionally, you will learn a lot through:
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interactions with fellow graduate students in this research group and other groups,
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colleagues at professional meetings,
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your research mentor, other professors, and
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teaching as a TA
These
experiences and interactions will help develop your leadership skills.
Your courses will be selected so as to help you do a better job with your
thesis/dissertation and to better prepare you for your career.
Regarding grades, you must maintain
at least a 3.0 GPA to maintain your teaching or research assistantship.
Yet, courses and studying for them shouldn’t take up all your time. 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
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 transcends to the department, school, 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 project. Although it may be difficult due to scheduling
and distribution through the biology department-occupied buildings, we encourage students to collaborate and assist each other in any way
possible.
4)
Your Schedule and Time Management
We
do not require any set hours or amount of time spent at school. This is
not a factory, and we don't have a time clock. If you are productive at
home or elsewhere, then that can be satisfactory.
However, there are certain things that can only be accomplished at
school. For example, it is difficult to gain the advantage of interaction
with fellow students (and your mentor) and to cooperate on achieving goals
if you aren't here. In particular, the leadership we expect from Ph.D.
students is hard 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 are going to 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 is a better reflection of your life to come as a professional.
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What
You Can Expect From Your Mentor
1)
Assistantships
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. That is, the number of hours
is irrelevant; you put in the amount of time required to achieve the goal
of producing 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 no grant is involved in which certain contractual
obligations to the funding agency exist. Also, you may not be given a
choice; it often just depends on what is available at the time in
question. 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
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 the like. 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, we as a
result we feel the responsibility to ensure that you have all the
reasonable tools of the trade” – and more, when possible.
3)
Moral support
Once
you are in our research group, you will have our support under just about
all circumstances. You don't have to worry about failing or having us lose
faith in you. The idea is to be comfortable in your surroundings, without
fear of failing, so you can focus on doing the best possible job in your
program.
4)
Developing an exciting, creative research project
As
stated above, the research project you work on will be the cornerstone of
your program here. 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 believe that part of making a
project exciting is to truly make it your project by dreaming it up and
then developing it yourself, which we encourage.
Of course, the role of your research mentor (who is more
experienced, not necessarily smarter), 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
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 >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.
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 any and all 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.
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Publishing Your Research
1)
Publication and Authorship Guidelines
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
bitterest arguments in science, but they are usually avoidable as long as
everybody knows the ground rules beforehand. However, each case is
different. There are some simple rules we try to follow, but they aren't
etched in stone. 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) manuscript preparation. 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 recent
publications that involved several members of a collaborative project have
numerous authors (http//www.biol.unt.edu/dpgr/publications.htm).
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
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.
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*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.