王汉森的博客分享 http://blog.sciencenet.cn/u/王汉森 Welcome to my blog!

博文

PhDs 正走出象牙塔

已有 2883 次阅读 2012-4-4 05:03 |个人分类:教育视窗|系统分类:海外观察|关键词:学者| 象牙塔

    自然》杂志4月2日发表新闻述评,谈英国目前正在进行的博士生培养改革。
     博士生不能再被看成科研奴隶,英国一些科研教育机构正重塑博士生培养模式,训练学生除科研以外的非科学技能。英国博士生培养改革的举措,正引起其他国家的密切关注。
 

Nature | News

 

PhDs leave the ivory tower

 

UK doctoral training centres prepare students to run a lab — or work outside academia.

 

Daniel Cressey

02 April 2012
 

Not so long ago, doctoral students were viewed as the galley slaves of the scientific world, spending long hours in the lab for a meagre wage and the promise that three precious letters — PhD — would eventually burnish their name.

 

But that attitude has changed. Recognizing that few graduates spend their entire careers at the bench, research funders and education authorities are reshaping the PhD to train students in non-science skills such as networking as well as research. One of the most radical expositions of this philosophy is unfolding in the United Kingdom, where PhD students are increasingly coming out from under the wing — and the shadow — of a PhD supervisor. Instead of being trained individually in one academic’s research group, they are being taught in cohorts in a doctoral training centre (DTC) — a university-based hub focusing on highly specific areas, such as chemical synthesis or nuclear fission. DTC courses last four years rather than the three of a standard UK PhD, and include formal coursework as well as lab experience.

 

Britain’s main physical-sciences funding body, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), has opened more than 50 DTCs, most of them in 2009. This year, for the first time, it has funded more students through centres than through research grants (see ‘Training in transition’). Some academics worry that the centre-based approach will squeeze blue-sky research out of PhD programmes — and deprive senior scientists of eager assistants. But delegates gave positive reviews of the DTC model last month at a meeting in London organized by Vitae, a government-funded group based in Cambridge that pushes for improved researcher training.

 

“The world of research is changing, has changed and will continue to change. I see centres as being a way that we respond to that,” says Neil Viner, associate director of the EPSRC. Other British funding agencies are now following the EPSRC’s lead, and several funders abroad are either considering adopting similar systems, or already working on it.

 

Rudiger Woscholski, deputy director of Imperial College London’s Institute of Chemical Biology DTC, says that the centre’s students are far better equipped than traditional PhD students to collaborate with other labs and with industry. Arieh Iserles, co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Analysis at the University of Cambridge, adds that the four-year DTC programmes also leave graduates better prepared for postdoctoral work.

 

Similar schemes have been launched by other UK research councils, such as the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), which sponsors doctoral training partnerships in which partner institutions receive grants to coach cohorts of students for four years. Although the partnerships do not create centres as such, they are designed to build a structured doctoral training environment. Celia Caulcott, director of innovation and skills at the BBSRC, points out that the councils are also keeping other funding routes open. Students can still pursue focused research-based degrees, she says, and universities that fail to become partners can still maintain PhD programmes funded by block grants based on their research income.

 

Other nations are closely watching Britain’s PhD reform. Lidia Borrell-Damian, senior programme manager for research and innovation at the European University Association in Brussels, says that there has been a Europe-wide move towards more formalized PhD training and stronger links with industry. Germany, for example, has begun to shift its PhD programmes to a model that increases institutional oversight and aims to prepare students for the wider world of work (see Nature 472, 276–279; 2011). The United Kingdom, adds Borrell-Damian, is a leader in many other innovative aspects of PhD reform, such as co-supervision with an academic and an external supervisor.

 

“In the years to come almost all universities in Europe will have to some extent a graduate school or a doctoral school,” she says. “That is unstoppable.”

 

 
Nature Volume: 484, Pages: 20 Date published: (05 April 2012) doi:10.1038/484020a


https://m.sciencenet.cn/blog-5414-555101.html

上一篇:人类祖先用火始于100万年前
下一篇:腰围测量有助于青少年健康风险评估

2 张伟 MassSpec1688

该博文允许注册用户评论 请点击登录 评论 (0 个评论)

数据加载中...

Archiver|手机版|科学网 ( 京ICP备07017567号-12 )

GMT+8, 2024-3-28 20:48

Powered by ScienceNet.cn

Copyright © 2007- 中国科学报社

返回顶部