We've Fig­ured It Out!

by Elio

It's been over 50 years since I be­gan teach­ing grad­u­ate stu­dents, but only in the last few do I think that we have it fig­ured out. Here in San Diego, a con­sor­tium of re­search in­sti­tu­tions has got­ten to­gether to pro­vide a some­what novel mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy course for be­gin­ning grad­u­ate stu­dents. Here is what we do. For each of our bi­weekly 1.5 hour lec­tures we bring in a guest lec­turer whose job it is to ex­plain, in 40 min­utes or less, why his or her field is the finest in all of bi­ol­ogy. This is fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion of a pa­per that has been read by the whole class. Now, I don't pre­tend that this is to­tally orig­i­nal, but it is at vari­ance with my pre­vi­ous ex­pe­ri­ence of hav­ing one or two pro­fes­sors teach such a course by them­selves.

Source

We call our course In­te­gra­tive Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy be­cause it serves to demon­strate that all as­pects of mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy have a great deal in com­mon. In other words, to be ex­posed to one topic is, to an ex­tent, to be ex­posed to all. Of course, an­other ben­e­fit is that the stu­dents come in close con­tact with lo­cal lu­mi­nar­ies, all of whom are ea­ger to show off their wares. Again, this is a splen­did of­fer­ing. How else would stu­dents be ex­posed to so many hot shots? It would seem that the same thing could be done at any re­search uni­ver­sity, even those not in a large city.

We care lit­tle about the breadth of cov­er­age pro­vided by the course; since you can­not teach it all, you might as well em­pha­size what is ex­cit­ing and in­ter­est­ing. We do, how­ever, group the lec­tures by topic, start­ing with struc­ture and func­tion, fol­lowed by ecol­ogy and evo­lu­tion, and then fin­ish­ing up with the in­ter­ac­tions be­tween mi­crobes and their hosts. And we do have a cou­ple of ex­ams. The ques­tions are typ­i­cally "write a short  grant ap­pli­ca­tion to study…" or "pre­pare the out­line of a lec­ture to un­der­grad­u­ate stu­dents on…" In other words, these are ques­tions whose an­swers can­not be Googled. And stu­dents also have the op­tion to write an ar­ti­cle for this blog, for which they would get credit on the exam. Older afi­ciona­dos of this blog may well re­call such hand­i­work. (See the list of posts be­low.)

We have been do­ing this for seven years now. In the be­gin­ning, it was Doug Bartlett of the Scripps In­sti­tu­tion for Oceanog­ra­phy and I who were in charge. Later Joe Pogliano from the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at San Diego joined us. The stu­dents come from both UCSD and San Diego State. Many of the guest lec­tur­ers come from these same uni­ver­si­ties, a few from the Salk or the Ven­ter In­sti­tutes.

I can­not fully ex­press in writ­ing the joy that we as teach­ers de­rive from this ex­pe­ri­ence. The amount of learn­ing we do is thrilling, al­most equal to the plea­sure that comes from not­ing the progress of ea­ger and in­tel­li­gent stu­dents. And, judg­ing from their re­sponses, the stu­dents love it. At least they don't have to en­dure a "sage on stage" who's de­liv­er­ing te­dium from the podium.

Elio is an Ad­junct Pro­fes­sor at both San Diego State Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at San Diego.

Posts writ­ten by IM stu­dents in prior years:

1. Elec­tri­fy­ing Bac­te­ria
2. What You Didn't Know About Jan­thi­nobac­terium
3. All Is Fair in Love and War­farin
4. When Cre­nar­chaeota Di­vide, They Mul­ti­ply
5. Planc­to­mycetes: The Far Out Bugs
6. You Are What You Eat
7. Our Coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence Staph