‘What is the most important lesson you learnt as a neuroscience master's student?’ A single-question study in postgraduate neuroscience education
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Sandrone, Stefano
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Introduction
Neuroscience is a young discipline and an expanding field of study and research. The number of neuroscience postgraduate courses has risen much more rapidly than in any other field of biomedical research. However, from a scholarship perspective, the master's experience has been understudied. This work focuses on the answers given by a group of neuroscience alumni, a rarely examined academic cohort, to a straightforward question: ‘What is the most important lesson you learnt as a master's student?’.
Methods
Thematic analysis was performed on 27 entries hosted by a public-facing blog of a STEM-intense university across four academic years.
Results
Four themes emerged: Skills, Theoretical knowledge, Attitudes and Community. Beyond replicating previous findings on the importance of skills and theoretical knowledge, an ‘imbalance’ between them has been reported for the first time. What emerges in our work is the overwhelming importance the alumni place in attitudes, especially resilience, and in the social/community aspects of learning, along with the role played by fellow students, faculty and laboratory colleagues.
Discussion
The master's level can be the ideal one for increasing awareness of resilience and learning how to make the most of it. Institutions should consider strategies for strengthening informal learning and supporting the development of professional identities. These findings can be of interest to a wide range of neuroscience educators and provide useful insights for designing effective postgraduate training courses. Future works can investigate the how beyond the what and explore the roles played by attitudes, emotions and feelings across neuroscientists’ career stages.
Neuroscience is a young discipline and an expanding field of study and research. The number of neuroscience postgraduate courses has risen much more rapidly than in any other field of biomedical research. However, from a scholarship perspective, the master's experience has been understudied. This work focuses on the answers given by a group of neuroscience alumni, a rarely examined academic cohort, to a straightforward question: ‘What is the most important lesson you learnt as a master's student?’.
Methods
Thematic analysis was performed on 27 entries hosted by a public-facing blog of a STEM-intense university across four academic years.
Results
Four themes emerged: Skills, Theoretical knowledge, Attitudes and Community. Beyond replicating previous findings on the importance of skills and theoretical knowledge, an ‘imbalance’ between them has been reported for the first time. What emerges in our work is the overwhelming importance the alumni place in attitudes, especially resilience, and in the social/community aspects of learning, along with the role played by fellow students, faculty and laboratory colleagues.
Discussion
The master's level can be the ideal one for increasing awareness of resilience and learning how to make the most of it. Institutions should consider strategies for strengthening informal learning and supporting the development of professional identities. These findings can be of interest to a wide range of neuroscience educators and provide useful insights for designing effective postgraduate training courses. Future works can investigate the how beyond the what and explore the roles played by attitudes, emotions and feelings across neuroscientists’ career stages.
Date Issued
2024-10-29
Date Acceptance
2024-08-29
Citation
BMC Medical Education, 2024, 24
ISSN
1472-6920
Publisher
BMC
Journal / Book Title
BMC Medical Education
Volume
24
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Identifier
https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-024-05970-6
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
1228
Date Publish Online
2024-10-29