After years of working in laboratories on campuses and interacting with graduate students, I thought I had an idea of what graduate school would be like.
Students learned about the lab's science; learned how to conduct research, including thinking critically and designing and performing experiments; and learned how to interact professionally with graduate-, postdoctorand, and faculty-level researchers.
I gave talks about careers in science, organized career panels, and was able to interact with lots of graduate students, postdocs, and administrators all around North America.
For example, most lab rotations feature group projects in which students with different backgrounds interact with each other and with graduate or senior undergraduate students.
The knowledge and fellowship gained from interacting with my fellow graduate students has been a real benefit to my graduate experience.
Many schools have campus-wide graduate student organizations that interact with upper-level administrators to address issues such as graduate assistantship salaries and benefits, tuition credit policies, training programs, and funding issues.
The first effort in this arena, a new functionality called Activity Stream that helps users more intuitively interact with their history and bookmarks, graduated from Test Pilot and shipped out with the new Firefox Quantum browser in November of this past year.
The Foundation has thus functioned to increase Australian awareness of state of the art international research, increased international recognition of Australian research, and allowed graduate students to interact with leading chemists based in institutions far from Australia.
Therefore, it is necessary for students to learn how to interact with the community and build relationships before they graduate and start working.
