 Graduate Student Education Mission The mission of graduate programs in the biomedical sciences is the education of academic, public, and industrial research scientists, with due consideration to the needs for specific types of professionals in the work force. Vision The graduate programs will attract academically talented students from throughout the U.S., and to some extent the world. They will educate these students in laboratories of faculty who are nationally recognized for the quality of their research as measured by publications and peer reviewed funding. The students will graduate within five years (Ph.D.) or two years (Masters) of matriculation. They will subsequently be productively employed in a position which utilizes the graduate education they received. Goals of the Graduate Programs 1. Recruit the highest quality M.S. and Ph.D. graduate students. The major goal of the next five years is to increase substantially the quality and percentage of domestic students in our graduate programs. This will be accompanied by an assessment of the number of students who can be provided a high quality education by our faculty, given our resources and applicant pool. We will evaluate progress by tracking the number and credentials of the students making inquiries to our programs, the number and quality of applications received by programs each year, the results of applicant interviews, the quality of students enrolled in the programs, and the schools from which the students graduated. We will strive to have approximately 80% domestic students of whom at least 10% are underrepresented minorities. Overall GRE scores should approach 2000 and GPA's should exceed 3.5 for matriculating students. Letters of recommendation are valuable in assessing the student’s qualifications. We must also consider the needs for specific types of professionals in the work force. Improvements in cooperation and coordination among programs must be made to assure uniform quality across programs and efficient use of resources.2. Expand funding sources and offer competitive financial support to students. It is essential over the next five years to keep financial support for the Ph.D. students at a level that is competitive with the best programs in the country, if UC is to remain competitive for recruitment of highly qualified applicants. This will require strenuous efforts to obtain external support such as training grants. Programs will increasingly compete internally for limited resources on the basis of quality. At the present time, to compete with graduate programs in other institutions requires that we offer a nationally competitive stipend, remission of tuition and fees, and provision of medical insurance. This support must be guaranteed for five years if the student is performing well and making satisfactory progress toward the degree. A sixth year of support should be possible under certain well defined circumstances.3. Improve mentoring of graduate students. We must develop policies which will shorten the time-to-degree for the Ph.D. students to five years, including both coursework and research. With continuing reductions in funding likely in the future, limiting the period of guaranteed financial support of students in good standing to five years becomes increasingly necessary, if fiscal responsibility is to be maintained. To accomplish this requires the graduate committees in each program to examine the progress of each student regularly and systematically and to provide timely feedback to the student and advisor. Better mentoring of the graduate students by the faculty can effectively decrease lost or wasted time because of poor work/study habits, poor techniques, highly untenable hypotheses, or unworkable approaches.4. Evaluate and modify the curricula of the thirteen graduate programs to ensure their highest quality. As part of the North Central Association Accreditation Review during 1998-99, all graduate courses will be reviewed and appropriate changes made as needed. The Core Courses in the graduate curriculum will be evaluated by a special committee and recommended changes will be considered and/or implemented. The core curriculum (Molecular Biology of the Cell I, II, and III and Molecular Genetics) is an excellent basis for all graduate students in the life sciences. For many students, a core course in epidemiology and environmental health should be required because most diseases have, in part, an environmental etiology. Grading policies for the various courses in the core curriculum should be standardized. Coordination among programs to assure efficient use of resources and reduction in duplication is essential.5. Optimize our ability to recruit outstanding graduate students in the biomedical sciences in competition with other biomedical graduate programs. The University of Cincinnati is extremely heterogeneous with regard to the mission of its various units. Doctoral (Ph.D.) and Masters’ degree granting programs of the professional colleges such as Law, Engineering, Business, College Conservatory of Music, Design/ Architecture, and Medicine have generally attained high rankings among peers nationally, although they are not all well known to the general public. There is enormous variation among these graduate programs in criteria for admission, knowledge and skills expected of graduates, and measures of quality of faculty and students. The concept of a Graduate School encompassing all academic units of a university was developed in the 19th century to be applied largely to colleges of arts and of sciences which were then the dominant units of most research universities. A rethinking of the organization of the UC Graduate School is appropriate because of the development of research and scholarship in many diverse units of the University. Aims would be to enhance name recognition, resources available, quality of performance as measured by national benchmarks, and quality of students recruited. This would be especially relevant to those programs at UC which are nationally competitive. Biomedical research is highly concentrated on the medical center (East) campus as is the majority of extramural, peer reviewed funding for basic research. The biomedical graduate programs have generally received excellent external reviews by peers, compete nationally for students and resources, and would be strengthened by creating a Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences within the College of Medicine. Such schools exist in many of the other research intensive medical centers with which UC must compete nationally. Our Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences could be marketed nationally to achieve focused name recognition for excellence. This would improve both the visibility of our programs nationally and our ability to compete for students and postdoctoral fellows with other biomedical research institutions.6. Evaluate job opportunities for Ph.D.'s. Workforce needs in the biomedical sciences are being studied nationally. The outcome of these studies will be reviewed by our graduate programs to examine how we can best prepare our graduates for the future. More formal career counseling may be desirable. Changes in the relative size of programs may be needed as job opportunities change from discipline to discipline.7. Recruit and retain an outstanding graduate faculty with improvement in diversity. The college as a whole is making efforts to change the mix of our faculty to include more women and underrepresented minorities. They will be excellent, productive scholars and teachers who serve as role models for graduate students. Their presence will enhance our ability to recruit minority students and women, especially to tenure track positions.8. Improve support of postdoctoral fellows. Postdoctoral trainees are engaged in research in laboratories throughout the various units of the College with poor coordination of conditions of employment, quality of education, and subsequent tracking of careers. Data about postdoctoral programs must be available to facilitate competition for peer reviewed external support of programs such as training grants. Concerns about postdoctoral fellows has lead several leading research intensive institutions such as the University of California at San Francisco to develop formal institutional programs to support these young scholars.Measurable Benchmarks of Success of Graduate Student Education 1. Increase the domestic pool of applicants by 100% by 2002 compared to academic year 1997. 2. Increase the diversity of our student population to reflect more closely the demographics of the United States as a whole. 3. Maintain our recruitment package for predoctoral students (tuition remission, stipend, fees, insurance) and quality of student (GRE, GPA) in the top 20% nationally. 4. Decrease the time from matriculation to Ph.D. degree to five years or less, while maintaining quality of our programs. 5. Implement long term follow up of our graduates to evaluate their success by their accomplishments in their chosen fields. |
