S4E3: How to mastermind experimental designs and and your graduate applications
In this episode, we talk with Dr. Scott Barolo about how he made a popular board game into a teaching tool, and we start a two-part discussion about the grad school application process.\n\nScott gained his BSc at Penn State University and his Ph.D. in biology at the University of California, San Diego. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at the same university and started his lab in 2003 at the University of Michigan Medical School. Scott\u2019s lab studies transcriptional pathways, repressors, and enhancers in Drosophila melanogaster. He has been the director of the graduate training Program in Biological Sciences (PIBS) since 2012. He is also a co-founder of the \u201c9 Reply Guys\u201d - inspired by #MeTooSTEM - where he humorously categorizes unconstructive Twitter behavior of men/women into 9 types. \n\nIn this episode, we discuss a publication with Amy Strom, who was then an undergraduate student, titled \u201cUsing the Game of Mastermind to Teach, Practice, and Discuss Scientific Reasoning Skills\u201d, published in PLOS One in 2011. We discuss how he \u201cforced\u201d his students to play this codebreaker game and how it helped them think about good experimental design, hypothesis testing, and biases.\n\nThis paper helped provide some insight into aspects of scientific design that are often not explicitly explained to trainees. In the same vein, we ask Scott to describe the process of applying to graduate school. We talk about the advantages of taking off a couple of years first and getting lab experience to see if graduate school is a good fit. We get into a time machine and recall our own applications and how not to randomly apply to universities and programs. \n\nScott says when he evaluates large stacks of applications, being an overachiever is great but the applications he remembers are from people who are different in some way. He recommends students to \u2018show a bit of themselves\u2019 in personal statements. They should not be afraid to share some of their out-of-academia interests either!\n\nThe conversation was so great we decided to split the episode into two sections so look out for the continuation in our next episode where Scott demystifies the interview process!\n\nA transcript for this episode generously provided by Joe Stormer can be found here: https://bit.ly/3do5FNM \n\nSHOW NOTES: \n\nStrom, A.R. and Barolo, S., 2011. Using the game of mastermind to teach, practice, and discuss scientific reasoning skills. PLoS biology, 9(1), p.e1000578.\nhttps://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000578\n\nBarolo Lab website: https://www.barololab.net/ \n\nShould you go to grad school? (Via Plantae) https://plantae.org/blog/should-you-go-to-grad-school-from-science-careers/\n\nTwitter link to 9 reply guys introduction: https://twitter.com/sbarolo/status/1036685010869407744 \n\nTwitter: \n@9replyguys\n@sbarolo\n@ehaswell\n@baxtertwi\n@taprootpodcast\n#TaprootTuesday