On the priority of classes to the graduate student

I can remember the quote from the somewhat disturbed actor Russell Crowe, playing the severely disturbed John Nash in the Ron Howard directed flick, “A Beautiful Mind”: “don’t take classes. Classes will dull your mind.”

I think what Russell/John was getting at here is that, for someone who is the mental equivalent of Albert Einstein, classes may be a drag. I mean, how do you teach someone who knows it all?

Classes are obviously important for us mere mortals for a number of reasons. First, like a drill instructor, teachers force us to read literature and perform tasks that we normally would not do. Just last semester, I had to write a term paper for a seminar course. I had decided to write a literature review on the study area I had chosen for my dissertation research. Being a new PhD student, I hadn’t even begun this research, let alone read up on the region. Thus, I knew I would be forced to eventually learn about this subject, and it was something I should be doing outside of class. But alas, I had no motivation. I just couldn’t bring myself to read the papers. I was dreading it. I knew that it was something I should be doing in the normal course of my career here at Madison. But, the fear of receiving a bad grade in my seminar course eventually outweighed my persuasion to procrastination (on the last day of the semester, of course). But, now I know much more about my study area. As I look back on my many years of school, I see long time frames of relatively little learned, punctuated by frantic learning episodes brought on by deadlines. Am I saying that due dates and deadlines are good things? For your stress level, no. For your accumulated wisdom, yes. Secondly, classes are important for students because they offer an opportunity for us to more readily understand concepts, facts, etc. I often find myself reading books or articles, and having no idea of what I just read. For example, this is an excerpt from the article Extending the radiocarbon calibration beyond 26,000 years before present using fossil corals by Fairbanks et al. (2005):

The IntCal04 workshop recommends using a limit of ≤1% calcite for inclusion in the radiocarbon calibration curve (Reimer et al., 2002) based on typical detection limits reported in the literature. Edwards et al. (1997) proposed 231Pa/235U dating of coral samples as a rigorous test of the accuracy of the 230Th/234U/238U age. This redundant dating technique has been applied to fossil coral and used for radiocarbon calibration in the age range of 12–50 kyr (Cutler et al., 2004; Mortlock et al., 2005).

So what does this mean? If you’re like me, you have no idea. The first time I read this article, I got a headache. But, after hearing my professor explain the concepts simply and elegantly, I now know that all those big words boil down to a simple concept: corals can be accurately dated. But you need to be sure that you’ve got contaminant-free coral. Now why couldn’t they just say that in the first place?

So, it seems classes are important after all, because they keep us on track by force-feeding us information. Great. But lately I’ve observed a dichotomy in my graduate career: redundancy in class alongside completely foreign concepts. The latter is illustrated by the Fairbanks et al. (2005) excerpt above. Upon my entrance into the PhD scene last year, there were a lot of these, and at times they could be really intimidating. Especially when it seems like everyone else gets it except me. The former happens when you are familiar with the concepts being presented in class. This also happens to me quite a bit. For instance, consider the distribution and make-up of Mediterranean biomes throughout the world. If I have one more professor expound the wonderful endemism and species diversity of this biome, I’m going to puke. There are many other examples as well, but it simply boils down to this: I already know many of the concepts that my professors are trying to teach me. Does this mean I’m a genius? Hardly. I think this is a common occurrence for the PhD student: I’ve been in school for so damn long, many of my classes are essentially re-runs. This is complicated by the fact that as one specializes in a particular subject area, the classes taken become more and more overlapping (convergent teaching?). Thus one could say that the redundancy of classes is proportional to the temporal length of the collegiate career of the student in question.

But is it really important to take all these classes? Or should the priority be placed on original research? Which will get you a kick-ass job at a tier 1 institution upon graduation? I’ve been asking myself these questions lately. In some ways I feel that excelling in classes doesn’t matter that much; the important thing is to simply get the gist of the lectures. But on the other hand, the person giving you the grade will some day be your peer. This professor will undoubtedly remember how you performed in his/her class, and base your reputation upon it. I suppose this could be made up in other ways, like being an excellent field researcher or something like that. Personally, I think it’s important to excel in class now, since you can’t change your transcript later. I can personally attest to the fact that poor grades in my undergraduate career still haunt me to this day.

Some might argue that the priority should be placed on getting published. I can see how this might be, since new academics need to get their names out there. It certainly is impressive to have a long list of publications on the vitae. I’ve been working toward this lately. If all goes well, I could have three or four manuscripts submitted to various journals this year. Now, will that actually happen? Probably not. But that’s the plan anyway. Like getting good grades, getting published can help in the long run. As long as you’re exporting sound science, that is. Throwing junk science out there won’t work; it only hurts your reputation. Just look at what happened to Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. You might remember him as the Korean scientist who faked his work on stem cells and cloning. I don’t think publishing On the priority of classes to the graduate student on this blog space really counts either.