In graduate school I was taking classes with some incredibly bright students. There were two people who were veterinarians studying for Ph.Ds. and an MD/Ph.D. student as well as regular Ph.D. students. All of them were superstars in their undergraduate programs or even in their first doctorate degree. I say all of “them” because I did not feel like a superstar. But the sad truth is that in a room full of students who were in the top ten percent of their class as undergraduates the average student was in the top 5% prior to graduate school. People who have never received anything less than an A in college will get Bs in graduate school. While I was in graduate school, with each new year after the first set of grades come out, there were always some tears and fear (of failure) from people receiving their first B. Often the more senior and seasoned students would say, if you got your first B ever; “get over it.” It is a different world in graduate school. There really was no grade inflation so each class had a bell shaped curve and there were people who were aces in college now struggling to get by in graduate school. That Ph.D. degree is neither free nor easy.

The class load in graduate school is lighter than in undergraduate with regard to the number of classes. But a lot more independent study and learning is needed and the whole class scheme in general much less structured. We were often not given specific reading assignments but told to understand what was in the assignment, we were however, advised to learn about a subject on our own. An assignment might be something like, “come to the next class ready to discuss the evidences for blood circulating throughout the body.”

This meant that we would have to find the texts and papers that reported research on this subject and be ready to discuss it in class. Students would come to class with references dating back to William Harvey’s experiments in the 1600s up to and including more modern indicator dilution methods which requires injections into the blood stream and measuring how the concentrations change over time. With 400 years of research, there were lots of evidences to be discussed. So from a reading assignment perspective one would have to choose a discussion option or two and stick with it. During the class it was important to be familiar with your evidence because if no one else came up with that perspective you would have to be and act as the expert in that subject. However, by the time such a class discussion was done, we would all be very familiar with several hundred years of research evidence in that subject area. Sometimes even the faculty members would acknowledge learning factoids that they would have otherwise not known.

In my current role as a college professor, I have embraced this teaching method on occasion and used it to my benefit. There was one particular subject, for instance/for example, that I felt I needed to update myself on and know better, so I had the class prepare a general discussion on research evidences related to that subject. I would also be studying for this class as the faculty in charge of the discussion, but I also wanted to learn what the students came up with. I was banking on the searching ability of the students to help maximize what I wanted to learn. I was not disappointed in that several students had references and research evidence I had not seen before and their efforts helped me get caught up on the subject matter very effectively. As many have said before, “the best way to learn a subject is to teach it.”

In much of my undergraduate education we took classes and learned essentially everything from published texts. Those texts were sometimes several years old. In fact most information in a textbook is ten years old even when the book is brand new. Thus what we learned in our undergraduate classes tended to be information that was 20 years old or more. But in graduate school that all changes drastically. We essentially stop learning from textbooks and get our lessons from team-taught classes where experts in the field teach the lectures. We learn research methods and the latest scientific thought from scientists who are actively publishing their data in trade journals. The reading assignments we might get were those journal articles ‑again because the texts were out of date. As a graduate student it was assumed, and pretty much demanded, that we know anything that was published in the textbooks as well as keeping up with the latest trends and technologies. Information in a textbook was a foundation at best and old news a lot of the time.

I was a lab assistant in a class on mammalian physiology. The lab was focused on renal physiology, that is: how the kidneys work. A student showed me a passage in the text about how the kidney reabsorbed compounds from the urine to go back into the blood. He said that the lecturer gave a different explanation than what was in the text. The lecturer said that there were sodium and chloride pumps but the text said only sodium pumps worked in the kidney and this discrepancy made the student confused. I told him that when the book was written it was correct, but that since it was ten years old that technology had changed and that the lecturer was correct. While I was accustomed to the rapidly changing nature of science, it was his first exposure to the idea of a written text being wrong and out of date. He seemed befuddled and unsure what to believe. I said to believe the live persons, me and the professor, and not the text.

For my Ph.D. research I had to know all the literature and publications that came before me and be reading all the new ones as they came out. To be truly successful in my work towards a Ph.D. I would need to stay on top of all the literature in my field. I felt a personal defeat if someone mentioned a new technology or publication to me, relevant to my work, without me having read about it first. I knew some senior faculty who said they did not keep up with the literature because they were too busy making the literature, and maybe someday I might feel that way. But as a Ph.D. student, reading everything related to my research was a job requirement.