Program Overview
The Home Program
Stanford Biosciences at a Glance716 |
The goal of the Home Program is to allow each graduate student to receive his/her training within a relatively small and cohesive group of faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows who share common scientific interests and intellectual approaches. This avoids the anonymity that large and diffuse global admissions and training programs can create. Each student is admitted to a particular Home Program, which then provides the primary base for training during the first year. However, a student may be interested in the research of faculty across a range of disciplines, spanning multiple departments and programs, and student interests often evolve during the first year in response to their experiences in formal courses and seminars, lab rotations, and informal interactions with faculty and students in different programs. Thus, the Biosciences programs allow a student to explore research opportunities, do rotations, and eventually decide on dissertation research, in any of the 13 Home Programs.
During the first year at Stanford, Biosciences graduate students carry out laboratory research rotations in two to four laboratories to help them learn about different areas and styles of research and ultimately make informed choices of laboratories for their dissertation research. These rotations may be done entirely within the original Home Program or may take full advantage of the wide range of opportunities at Stanford: a student may work in any Biosciences laboratory, subject only to space constraints and consent of the faculty member. Each student’s first rotation during Fall Quarter is in one of the laboratories of the Home Program. During this time, students also settle into graduate life, take formal course work (based on their interests, backgrounds, and the requirements of their Home Programs), and attend faculty research presentations, seminars by local and visiting speakers, journal clubs, research retreats, and symposia both within and outside the Home Program. Based on these experiences, input from the Home Program's graduate advisors, and discussions with other faculty and current students, the student meets with faculty of interest to arrange the subsequent laboratory rotation(s). Typically, more than half of first-year students do at least one rotation with faculty outside their original Home Programs. This flexible system for rotation selection not only provides a student with exposure to a range of laboratories for potential dissertation research, but also broadens his/her knowledge of the many ongoing projects and resources available at Stanford. Indeed, it is common in later years to obtain help from, or even engage in collaboration with, a former rotation laboratory.
The choice of laboratory for dissertation research is typically made at the end of the second or third quarter in residence but is occasionally postponed until a fourth rotation has been done over the summer at the end of the first year. Emphasis is on allowing each student, in consultation with his/her academic advisors, to feel comfortable that an appropriate choice has been made. The selection of the dissertation laboratory and research topic is a joint decision between the student and the prospective faculty thesis advisor. When a student chooses a thesis laboratory outside his/her original Home Program, s/he typically, although not always, transfers into a Home Program with which the thesis advisor is affiliated.
Biosciences at Stanford and Beyond
The Biosciences programs offer each student a wide range of choices, while also ensuring that s/he is integrated into a cohesive academic community both immediately upon entering the graduate program and at each stage thereafter. The increasingly clear interrelationships among areas of biology and the biomedical sciences that were previously viewed as distinct make it all the more important for students to do research in an interactive and cooperative research environment. Cross-disciplinary research and training has always been a great strength of the Biosciences programs at Stanford. All the science and engineering departments are located in close proximity to one another on a single campus, fostering interactions and collaborations not just between groups formally in the biosciences, but also often extending to chemistry, physics, psychology, computer sciences, and/or chemical, electrical, material, and civil engineering. Beyond the Stanford campus, the San Francisco Bay Area has an extraordinarily broad and deep range of biological, biomedical, and other scientific and technical knowledge and expertise. The rich scientific environment fosters regular meetings of special interest groups that include scientists both from Stanford and from UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and other nearby institutions along with the major biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and electronics companies of Silicon Valley.
In summary, Stanford's traditional freedom of inquiry and entrepreneurial spirit, coupled with the freedom provided by the Biosciences programs for students to explore and move among diverse academic fields and programs, provides an unsurpassed opportunity to obtain the best possible graduate education.