Looking for research experience? Here's a study that tells you what Profs are looking for.

Twitter is a great place to discover stuff, and the other day I learned about a new preprint from Dr. Felicia Vulcu’s team in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University. They looked at how Professors (aka “Principle Investigators” or “PIs” – the person who is in charge of a research lab) evaluate undergraduate applicants for research positions.

Go read this preprint!

This is a very timely topic, as my colleagues and I get a lot of emails over the summer from undergraduate students looking for lab positions, or for a supervisor for their honours thesis. I coordinate the thesis course for my department, so I think about this kind of stuff quite a bit and also get a close look at the students that pass through our program. 

I suspect that many students will be surprised by the study’s findings, but they ring true to my own views and experience. From the abstract:

 “Our findings suggest that the top five student traits valued by principal investigators are: motivation, resilience, hard work, inquisitiveness and honesty. Surprisingly, emphasis on grades as a screening tool decreased as age of laboratory and frequency of publication increased. Additionally, we identified an inverse correlation between student interest in medical school and research supervisor interest in selecting the student for an undergraduate research experience.”

 The paper itself is easy to read, so you should take a look and see how the authors’ interpret their findings. I’m going to add some context and a few of my own thoughts here. While this study focusses on undergraduate research projects, I think that the findings also apply to how PIs look for graduate students.

According to the study, the top traits PIs look for in a potential undergraduate researcher were not related to the student’s GPA. Instead, PIs were more interested in looking for evidence of “motivation” and “resilience”. This might surprise many students who assume that profs want the “smartest” students to work in their lab. While it is true that intelligence is a requirement for success in research, if you’ve already made it into our highly competitive degree program, we already know that you’re smart. Beyond that, few of us are very convinced that that grades (perhaps ironically, including grades earned from the courses that we teach ourselves) are particularly good at stratifying students based on intelligence - or at least the type of broad, and difficult to define “intelligence” that translates to success in the research environment.

What we do know, based on our experience, is that success in the lab does depend on an ability to overcome the many challenges, failures, and setbacks that are inherent to experimental research, no matter how smart you are. This requires an inner drive, curiosity, and resilience that can’t be taught or measured through grades.

What else, in addition to “grit”, were PIs looking for in a prospective student? According to the study: evidence of honesty and good social skills. Scientists in the movies are portrayed as brilliant loners, but this study suggests that PIs aren’t looking for the next solitary genius. Like Nick Fury, PIs are trying to assemble a whole team of scientific Avengers who can depend and rely on each other to work together toward a common goal and help each other up after science delivers a beating. A team full of Tony Starks would not be much of a team.

This is not a team.

Finally, I want to comment on another of the study’s findings that you might have found surprising; that admitting that your goal is to go to medical school will work against you when you are looking for a research position. In fact, the authors found that more than 90% of PIs looked at this as a negative, and nobody considered it a positive. Wow. Harsh.

Some of this attitude may be left over from the days when scientists were mostly interested in reproducing themselves and didn’t much value trainees that strayed outside of the narrow lines of an academic career. This attitude is changing quickly, with the recognition that the large majority of students who pass through the lab will not stay in research. I, for one, think that all medical students should have some research experience. Still, it’s clear that I’m in a small minority by being, at best, ambivalent to the medical aspirations of a potential student. 

An old friend from my own undergraduate days, Dr. Dezene Huber, who is now an insect ecology prof at the UNBC (check out his cool lab blog here), expressed another common feeling to me this way: that if an undergrad student is principally oriented to med-school, that “often means that the student sees my lab and their experience as another notch in the application belt”. No one likes to feel used.

The authors of the study note that there is some bias against students with top grades, and suggest that this is tied to the idea that these students are less likely to have had to work for them, or to have overcome failure – again reflecting the preference for motivated and resilient students. As there is a strong overlap between students with high grades and those with an intention to go into medicine, this points to another potential explanation for the bias.

It is also my experience, and that of colleagues I’ve spoken to, that many students who are dead-set on a medical career have never even thought to consider something else, or are pursuing medicine because that is the expectation of their family. This doesn’t bode well for their independence or creativity.

What the authors don’t attempt to address is whether or not PIs are correct to devalue high grades and medical school hopes. We all have plenty of anecdotal stories to validate our biases; of students with the best grades who also had terrible lab-hands and, conversely, of students with mediocre grades who turned out to be superstar researchers. Most of us PIs were not top students grade-wise ourselves, but discovered an aptitude for research through our own exposure to the lab as undergraduates.

Still, I can also think of several examples of students in our programs that break this rule. Every year, we give an award to the top honours student, based entirely on her or his lab work and final thesis. For the past few years, the winners of this award have also been right at the top of their classes in their other courses grade-wise. A few have gone on to medical school. Nevertheless, these students were outstanding, not because of their grades, but because they also possessed the “non-cognitive traits” outlined in this study.

They get knocked down, but they get up again, ain’t never gonna keep them down.

So, is there a take-away for students looking for research experience? Take a look at the list of traits the authors determined that PIs are looking for in prospective students: motivation, resilience, hard work, inquisitiveness, and honesty. Don’t hide your top marks or be dishonest about your interest in a medical career, but do think about how you are going to demonstrate these other, more important traits. Do you have a hobby that shows off your determination and grit? Have you had to teach yourself how do something that you find interesting? Can you work well with and contribute to a team? Can you show that you are reliable?

There is a lot of diversity in a lab when it comes to individual skills and interests – so which Avenger are you?

Edited from the original to fix stupid spelling mistakes, typos, bad grammar, and to add a point made by Dr. Huber.

New publication from us

note: this post is part of our ongoing experiment with SciCom and social media.

We’re excited to tell you about our new study, published today in Cell Reports.

We, like other Immunology labs, spend much of our time trying to understand how the immune system decides what it’s going to attack and how. T cells and B cells are two families of immune cells that are both responsible for identifying a specific target (called an “antigen”) and directing the immune system to attack it, although they go about that role in very different ways. Still, under most circumstances, B cells and T cells that recognize the same antigen collaborate with each other to determine how the immune response will develop, and this impacts the effectiveness of the resulting response. Figuring out how this is achieved is a very active field in immunology.

Lead author and recent PhD grad. Dr. Rajiv Jain.

Our study, led by recent PhD grad Dr. Rajiv Jain, started with a very simple question:

Does the immune response to a self-antigen, in this case to myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG), a protein found in the central nervous system (CNS – brain and spinal cord), develop differently compared to a response to a more “normal” foreign antigen?

We had several reasons for wanting to know the answer to this question. One is that we and others use MOG protein to induce CNS autoimmunity in animals to model human diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS) (see more about that here, and about our MOGtag proteins here). We have been using these models to try to understand how B cells contribute to disease, and so far have focused mostly on the B cells that infiltrate the inflamed CNS (see here and here). However, after a few surprises (to us, at least) it became apparent that we needed a more in-depth understanding of the basics of the B cell response to MOG antigen.

A second motivation for this study is that, in addition to our more MS and related disease-oriented studies, we are also very interested in simply understanding how the immune system works and how it tailors its response to a specific target. So far, nearly all investigations of this process (including our own primary and collaborative studies – see here, here, and here) have studied the response to a very short list of model target antigens. We had a hunch that the response to MOG might be different enough to be a useful tool to dissect the signals responsible for determining immune outcome, allowing us to address these types of questions from a different perspective than we or others have used previously.

It turned out that our hunch was correct. When Rajiv immunized mice with MOG protein, the B cell response was initiated relatively normally compared to the standard model foreign antigen, but it wasn’t sustained. Instead, the organized B cell response collapsed early into what at first looked like Memory B cells, specialized cells that respond the next time you see the same antigen. However, it turned out that these cells didn’t live very long, so the memory response to MOG failed. We performed some experiments to determine which features of the B cell response to MOG were controlled by the T cell partner, and also manipulated the antigens in different ways to alter the outcome of the response.

So, why is any of this important? To other Immunologists, this study represents another step forward in our cumulative understanding of how the immune system controls the outcome of its response to a target antigen. This is inherently important to those of us who want to understand how biology works. It’s harder to explain the value of fundamental research like this to those outside of the science community. If this were a standard press release, this is the part where we’d say something like “in 20 years, these findings could result in better treatments for autoimmune disease, or better vaccines”. This could, in fact, turn out to be the case; fundamental studies like ours asking similar questions about how immune cells signal to each other led to the development of Checkpoint Inhibitors – and this work was just awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the way they have revolutionized the treatment of many cancers. In fact, if you dig into the history of nearly every major advance in medicine or technology you will find similar foundations on so-called curiosity-based research.

Science is a group effort! Rajiv (top row, second from the left) led the project, and Yodit (top row, second from left), Heather (Bottom row, left), and Kate (second from left) all contributed to this publication. Past undergrad Emiliano Romanchick (not in this picture) also contributed to the study and is an author on the paper.

Want to be a part of the team? We’ll be looking for a new PhD and undergraduate trainees soon!

Nevertheless, there are more short-term outcomes from our new study for our own work. First, we’re applying what we’ve learned about the anti-MOG B cell response to our investigations of B cells in autoimmune disease. The findings from this study will help PhD student Yodit Tesfagiorgis to refine the questions she’s asking in our more disease-oriented work. Also, we now have a unique model to study the signals T cells use to affect what B cells do in an immune response. Post-doc Dr. Kate Parham is pushing these investigations forward and she already has some tantalizing results that we’re looking forward to sharing with you one day in a future publication.

 A Note About Funding:

The work we do is entirely dependent on your support, whether it be through your taxes or donations to funding agencies. Thank you! Lead author Rajiv Jain was funded by a studentship from the MS Society of Canada. They also fund co-authors Yodit Tesfagiorgis (PhD Studentship) and Kate Parham (Post Doctoral Fellowship).

Operating funding for the lab (covering the actually cost of experiments, not just people) has come from a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Taking a trip to St. Francis Xavier University for the endMS Sprint Face-to-Face meeting

Sorry for the delay with an update on my trip to St. Francis Xavier University, but here it is! Being a part of the endMS SPRINT program has allowed me the opportunity to travel to Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Meeting up with my Sprint team allowed us the opportunity to determine exactly what we wanted our review paper to be about. We also had the opportunity to explore Antigonish while tackling the reference screening of 8016 papers without the constant reminder of lab work!

Days consisted of morning walks to the coffee shop from our cozy AirBnB, followed by a full day spent in the Schwartz School McKenna Center sorting through the references we acquired. Antigonish was a wonderful, quaint town and Dr. Lindsay Berrigan was a wonderful host!

p.s. Pacha Mama was an amazing place to eat, which sits right next to the Waffle Bus Stop (another delicious place to eat).