Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from...

... not class, that's for sure.

As classes and finals end this week (and for medical school, next week) I've been taking the time to reflect on the last 5(!) years of my graduate education, thinking especially about how much of our learning comes not in the classroom, but through real experience with setting up reactions, analyzing data, and presenting that data to others.

For someone who was very much a "pre-med" student as an undergrad, who focused an awful lot of time on classroom efforts in order to get the best grades possible, entering grad school ended up being quite a shock to my system.  I remember coming in thinking about how much I could focus on the only 3(!) classes in the fall, thinking about what research group to join, and trying to adjust to my new location and place here at the U of I.

What I discovered very early on, however, is how much the classes are looked down upon as unnecessary by the faculty, who often have better things to do (i.e. you should be working in the lab) or are so discombobulated that they can't actually teach you anything (i.e. woefully unprepared to teach graduate level courses) or are so focused on the class that they nitpick and prevent you from doing well.  Unlike my previous experience in the classroom, the goal didn't seem to be teaching you any sort of skill, nor to make sure that you understand the theory, but rather to give you enough of a basic framework that you can go off and figure out the rest yourself.  A good plan for someone who hasn't relied on the classroom for learning, but not for someone who has focused all of his time on getting the most out of the classroom experience.

In the spring of my first year, we were given the opportunity to choose our own classes, as well as to take what is commonly called "doughnut class", as it takes place early on Saturday mornings and, often, also has doughnuts.  The doughnut class was supposed to give us a greater exposure to the different facilities and techniques that we could take advantage of in our department, a sort of "practical learning" class that should have been most helpful to those of us who were used to getting some useful info from the classroom.  Again, however, those who were in charge had no interest in helping, and a number of opportunities were essentially wasted (although we did get some good info on how to research in the library, among other things...).  I'm not exactly sure what could have been done differently, but I would think that a number of relatively basic things could have been covered in a practical setting, i.e. that we actually get to try doing these things instead of just hearing about them.  Training on the mass spectrometers or NMR machines, for example, may have been a good use of time.  Perhaps that would have helped?  My thoughts on the subject have dimmed somewhat, as it has now been 4 years since I took the class, but even so I have the feeling that we could have gotten more out of it.

So, the onus of learning was almost entirely on us to accomplish, through the help of our peers, professors, and the resources that had been made available.  While I can understand the idea of "learning from someone else", the catch with that concept is the fact that someone else has to know what you need to do in order to teach it to you.  The amount of information you have available is essentially left up to whether or not someone in the lab has previously done the technique you need to do and is willing to teach you that technique. 

For example, I have recently had a number of situations in which a senior member of the lab (and one of the few who has been here longer than me) has pointed out little pieces of wisdom that I have never heard before.  Now, this is not because she withheld that information, but rather because we have been working on completely different projects in different areas of the lab, with little chance for our projects to overlap.  In fact, there have even been chemicals that she has had available for quite a long time that I simply didn't know about.  Blame it on what you will (mostly me, it seems), but these little chunks of wisdom would have been more helpful much earlier than now, and some could possibly have been presented earlier than this in a formal setting.  There's enough "common wisdom" that it could definitely be put together in a 20 minute Power Point presentation, I would think.

I'm somewhat torn as to whether or not this style of learning is useful.  On the one hand, the system of "trial by fire" learning certainly does produce the results that are needed to complete thesis research and continue on to a research career, but at the same time I feel as though you are limited by your own ability to seek out the people who can help you and are at a disadvantage if they are not immediately nearby.  There have certainly been opportunities in the classroom to impart this type of advice, but clearly the onus is on the student to seek out that advice rather than being given it. 

In the end, it has become clear to me in my years as a researcher that this system, while occasionally problematic, is essentially the way it's "going to be" for the foreseeable future.  Despite the importance of learning in the classroom, the faculty will continue to turn their focus away from it in favor of getting students in the lab to produce results and learn through trial and error.  It's on the student to seek out the knowledge necessary to complete tasks and present at meetings, hopefully from other students in the lab but (if not that) also from those in other labs.  That being said, I should hope that some additional effort be made to increase the effectiveness of those classes we do have to take, to ensure that we get something out of them.

Med school, though... they teach you everything in the classroom.  And expect you to memorize it. 

Just as a follow-up, I'm curious - to those of you who have been through or are currently going through graduate programs of your own, how important was the classroom learning?  Did you find that you got anything special out of it, or did you just see it as a hurdle from getting into the lab?  Importantly for those who ended up being faculty members - did you find yourself having to re-learn things from your initial classroom years in order to be able to teach them, or did those pieces of knowledge stay with you through your lab work?  Just curious...