Finally, after all the experts and all the reports, recommendations, and best practice" guidelines, it is time for the nation's graduate students to have their say. And 32,000 have raised their voices in a common place--The National Doctoral Program Survey (NDPS). Overall, the students' message is clear--more than 80% of all respondents report positive mentoring experiences, including continuous ...
The legal standard for determining due credit and shared rewards of discoveries has changed, according to a story published recently in Science . A U.S. Appeals Court ruling in a University of Chicago case has lowered the barrier for court review of claims by postdoctoral students and junior faculty that they have been denied financial rewards from discoveries in which they have participated. The...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Reaching into the Next Wave electronic vault, we have found a rich collection to complement the articles in this month's feature. In Next Wave seven scientists working with patents write about what they do and how it connects to their training as a scientist. Meet a patent examiner, a patent agent, several patent lawyers, and a licensing agent. Read about their work. Wha...
A few days ago, the stock market in the United States fell to its lowest level since 1997 and markets around the world have been falling all year. So it is perhaps counterintuitive for Next Wave to train its focus on the careers of those involved in the commercialization of science. However, as Next Wave's editors around the world found out, this work continues apace and has in fact taken on a re...
High job satisfaction and rising salaries may be in the future for those young life scientists who stick at it long enough to become senior researchers and research administrators. These are among the findings of the AAAS 2001 Salary Survey of Life Scientists, the largest employment survey of U.S. life scientists ever conducted, which is published this week by Science . The AAAS membership office...
Information about the compensation of postdocs is annoyingly elusive. The reasons for this are widely known and commonly repeated. The vast array of postdoc funding sources, the lack of central institutional control of the employment status, and creative packaging of awards all contribute to the complexity of any effort to do comparative studies of postdoc funding. One graduate dean has quietly p...
In case you haven't noticed, the U.S. lacks a national policy on the production of science and engineering (S&E) talent. Moreover, as the various S&E constituencies--disciplinary societies, government agencies, industry groups, and general scientific societies--develop training plans and programs of their own, they tend to focus on narrowly defined interests. Reversing this trend and beginning to...
Editors play critical--but often behind the scenes--roles in publications of all sorts, as they work to make each individual manuscript, proposal, monograph, journal, or book as good as it possibly can be. Editors, as they are portrayed in movies and on television, are at once bookish and exciting. Science editors, like those we feature here, bring diverse and serious scientific backgrounds to th...
