The format for the course is as follows. Several months before each semester begins, the students get together with the faculty coordinator and select several speakers whom they would like to bring out for the seminar series. During the two to three weeks before each speaker arrives, the class will study the research from that speaker's laboratory, going over several recent papers, preparing questions to serve as the basis for a discussion with the speaker, and trying to speculate on where research in that laboratory has proceeded since the published research. At some point after the seminar, the students will meet with the speaker for a detailed discussion of their questions and any other issues raised by the seminar. Teaching Experience .
Teaching is an important part of any graduate curriculum.
Teaching experience gives students practice in expressing ideas orally and forces them to reformulate basic concepts in terms that are easily understood and organized. It also gives students a chance to investigate teaching as a career. Students will generally be involved in teaching during their second year, usually involved in the upper-division courses in their discipline. One of the most important aspects of the biomolecular devices program is the emphasis on the interdisciplinary nature of most of the problems which students will confront in their scientific careers. Students will explore the connections between different fields and the ways of integrating those fields together in the course work described above, but more importantly, students also need to experience research using a interdisciplinary perspective.