Expectations for Trainees
Reciprocal expectations
My goal is to see you succeed in our program and make important contributions to our field. To this end, I will assist you in developing your research trajectory, meet regularly with you to discuss your projects, provide you opportunities to work on LAB projects, review your applications and work, and use my networks to help connect you to people, field sites, etc. Mutual understanding of the expectations laid out below will help us work together to accomplish this. If I develop concerns that you are not meeting these expectations, I will raise them with you with ample time for you to correct the shortfall. Please do the same if you develop concerns about the opportunities, mentoring, or support you receive from me. Ultimately, you must pilot your own ship through graduate school. I can only help you with this if I have adequate communication from you.
Personal conduct
1. Comport yourself with courtesy and professionalism in your capacity as a LAB team member: Treat everyone with respect, avoid spreading rumors or engaging in gossip, and choose collaboration over competition. Let those around you know that this is what they can expect from you and that this is what you expect from them.
2. Recognize and combat bias: The LAB team is diverse with respect to race, gender identity, and socioeconomic background. Acknowledge that unrecognized bias exists and has adversely affected generations of underrepresented minorities, women and LGBTQ people, and those from poor and working class families. Look inward and recognize beliefs and values that can lead to unconscious bias. Cultivate empathy for those who have been adversely affected by bias, and bring this understanding to your collaborations and to your scholarship.
3. Avoid inappropriate relationships:
a. Avoid unprofessional romantic or sexual relationships within the LAB: LAB trainees frequently train newer members of the LAB team; as such, you should adhere to the standards faculty set for ourselves as teachers. Specifically, with respect to sexual contact between a teacher and a student, “what might appear to be consensual, even to the parties involved, may not in fact be so. Sexual relations between a faculty member and any student, undergraduate or graduate, when the faculty member is in a direct supervisory role with that student, shall normally be deemed unprofessional conduct.” Avoid sexual or romantic relationships with any undergraduate on the LAB team whom you could consider your student. More broadly, avoid sexual or romantic relationships with anyone who has—or may reasonably perceive that they have—less power within the institution of Binghamton University or the field of biological anthropology than you do.
b. No romantic or sexual relationships will be tolerated with residents of any LAB field site, nor with any collaborators, study staff, students, or participants outside of the field sites. No exceptions will be made to this policy. Such unequal and potentially exploitative relationships are ethically fraught and jeopardize our long-term relationships with collaborators, community leaders, and participants past and present. If the LAB Director learns of such a relationship, you may be immediately removed from the field site. Our current field sites are listed below. This policy extends to sites of independent student research.
i. The villages of Machame in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
ii. The Matlab area of Bangladesh
iii. The Mosuo villages around Lugu Lake in Yunan, China
iv. The islands of Vanuatu (data collection ranges across villages and islands; all localities must currently be considered the field site)
4. Be a good citizen of the LAB:
a. Do your fair share of lab chores; keep tabs on supplies and equipment and update the LAB Director promptly regarding needed supplies or maintenance. Lend a hand in lab work when it is needed and you are free.
b. Attend lab meetings regularly. Lab meetings are an opportunity to obtain useful feedback on ideas and hypotheses, study design, and initial findings. Present your work and view other members’ presentations in this spirit: feedback should be useful, and not overly critical of ideas still in development or works still in progress.
c. Participate in the training of those junior to you across all realms of research, from basic lab skills and the day-to-day running of the lab, to theoretical framing, study design, data collection, and statistical analyses.
d. Complete all required training (Environmental Health and Safety, Biosafety, Human Subjects Research) and maintain current certification documents on the LAB network drive (“Training certificates” folder).
5. Be a responsible co-author: Circulate all presentations, publications, and posters to all co-authors at least one week (and preferably two weeks) prior to submission/presentation. This is particularly important for conference or invited presentations, to avoid delivering underdeveloped presentations that reflect poorly on the LAB, university, and, most of all, on you. Give your co-authors enough time to provide feedback on your work (or, in rare instances, to remove themselves as co-authors or suggest that your work is not ready for presentation).
Determining authorship and order of authors can be tricky. Anyone who made a contribution to the ideas in the paper should be included; usually, this means anyone who conceived of or designed the study; performed the laboratory or data analyses presented in the paper; and, anyone who writes or substantially edits the paper. The LAB Director, study PI, and local scholarly collaborators usually fall in the first group and should be included in all papers; students and other members of the data collection team are usually included only if they contributed to analysis or writing for the paper. (You should offer all members of the data collection team an opportunity to contribute well before it is time to write the paper, but it is common for only some of them to take you up on it.)
For order of authors, if you are lead author, follow these general expectations: Your name will appear first; your MA/PhD committee chair (who may also be the LAB Director or the PI of the project that generated the data) should appear last (the “senior” author position); if you have a second important mentor or leader of the project, their name should appear second; all remaining contributors should be ordered between first/second author and last author in declining order of their contribution to the paper (generally, writing weighs more heavily than analysis). Discuss inclusion and order of authors with the LAB Director early and allow plenty of time for adjustments to the author list.
6. Actively seek internal and external funding: Graduate teaching/research assistantships, which include a tuition waiver and modest stipend, are available for ~50% of most students’ semesters. Departmental funds are set aside for your use for travel (e.g., to attend a conference or to collect data). These sources of support will not be adequate to cover all of the costs of living, research, and travel you are likely to incur each year, so you will need to secure additional funding. Identify and prioritize funding sources, and note application/proposal due dates. (Prospects include the NSF, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Geographic Society, Leakey Foundation, American Philosophical Society, Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays programs, and many others.) Seek feedback from your advisors and mentors on funding application drafts and plan for multiple rounds of revision before submission. Anticipate that you will “revise and resubmit” at least once; it is rare to receive funding on a first try. You cannot reasonably anticipate that the need to secure funding for your research will ever go away, so begin the habit of actively, constantly seeking funding now.
7. Be aware of departmental requirements for each stage of the MA/PhD as well as requirements that are unique to you: All students in our program share a foundation in biological anthropology that comes from similar coursework and qualifying exam requirements; however, you should not expect that your training will exactly replicate the experience of any other student. We provide mentorship and training that is uniquely tailored to each student’s interests and needs, culminating in unique dissertation research. You should seek information about the program’s general requirements from the LAB Director or Graduate Program Director, and take an active role in shaping your training to your interests and goals.
8. Maintain a reasonable GPA (~3.5-4.0) and keep up on your coursework.
9. Respect everyone’s time: Request letters of support/recommendation (and similar documents) at least two weeks in advance of their due dates, and allow reasonable time for feedback on drafts of manuscripts, fellowship or grant applications, etc (multiple weeks for long documents). Know that most faculty and fellow students’ availability during the summer is shaped by research travel and allow additional time for documents, feedback, etc.
Educational goals
10. Essential skills to develop as a LAB student:
a. Independent research: study design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation of results
b. Measurement and interpretation of biomarkers: basic lab bench safety and skills; principles of enzyme immunoassay; utility and limitations of biomarkers; selection and interpretation of biomarkers for a research question
c. Anthropometric measurement and interpretation: basic methods of anthropometric measurement; utility and limitations of anthropometry; selection and interpretation of anthropometric measurements for a research question
d. Teaching and mentoring: recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of mentees; providing feedback appropriate to a mentee’s abilities and career phase; providing feedback that is helpful and actionable
e. Presenting: preparing an abstract; tailoring a presentation to an audience; concisely communicating complex ideas and findings; preparing supporting materials (e.g., slides, posters)
f. Scientific writing: preparing a grant application, research report, or review article
11. Be clear about your goals: Not all PhDs work as university faculty, nor is this the best path for all students. You are encouraged, particularly early in your graduate career, to remain flexible in your career goals. Please do be clear with yourself and your mentors about what it is that you want to do with your PhD—this will help us advise you regarding which opportunities to pursue, which relationships to cultivate, where to put your efforts, etc.
12. Rewards accrue in proportion to your efforts: Be aware that if you do not put adequate effort into your training (lab skills, course work, independent research, paper authorship, fellowship/grant applications), it will lose value for you. This is particularly true for fellowship and grant applications—more applications mean more opportunities to be funded. This does not mean that all students must maintain the same pace or timeline of applications or publications, but it does mean that if you write fewer applications or submit fewer papers, you will accrue fewer successes. Conversely, students work at different paces; expect to accumulate achievements at a pace set by your own efforts.
13. Cultivate a growth mindset: There are always opportunities to improve your work; your mentors’ job is to help you identify and act on them. Seek ample feedback on funding applications, presentations, and publication submissions.
14. Work toward independence as a scholar: Ultimately, the arbiter of your success as a scientist, researcher, or scholar is not your PhD committee, but by our scholarly community, who do not work from a list of requirements. We provide you such a list at the outset of your training, but remember that this represents the minimum we require for successful completion of your degree. Work to understand what the field of biological anthropology expects and values in scientific research and use this as your guide; avoid substituting what your advisor/mentor “wants” or “requires” of you for this understanding.
15. Publication expectations: Expect to contribute to one to two papers (not necessarily of your own conception) in your first two years, not as lead author. Contributing may include reviewing literature; assisting with data collection, entry, cleaning, or analysis; or, writing up existing results (authorship should always include some analysis or writing). Expect to lead-author three to four papers after the second year. Not all of these must come from your own data, but they should all be of your own conception. Collaboration with other LAB members, including your fellow students, on publications is encouraged.
Approximate timeline (for a full-time PhD student)
Year 1:
a. Complete ~30 h of coursework, including:
i. 4-field distribution requirements (one course each in Archaeology, Linguistic Anthropology, and Sociocultural Anthropology, in addition to your Biological Anthropology coursework)
ii. ANTH 501 (only for those without an undergraduate degree in anthropology or comparable familiarity)
b. Begin “wet lab” training with ANTH 573 or a similar course, as well as independent study in the LAB.
c. Complete applications for NSF GRFP and other fellowship support (NSF GRFP applications are due during Fall semester; students with a Master’s degree are usually ineligible).
d. Identify and begin a summer research activity; this will be unique to each student, and may be based in the field, lab, or be completed remotely, but it should advance the goal of collaborating on a publication.
Year 2:
a. Complete ~30 h of coursework, including (between Year 1 and Year 2):
i. At least one of Evolutionary Theory, Human Biological Variation, and Human Paleontology
ii. Advanced Statistics: Multivariate Regression Analyses and at least one additional course with a primary focus on statistical analysis
iii. Methods in Biomedical Anthropology
iv. At least one “lab methods” course or ~8 h independent study in the LAB
b. Present (poster or podium presentation) research at one or more academic conferences (AAPA/HBA or EAS at AAA are good choices), ideally from results of summer research.
c. Identify a Master’s Thesis topic(s), constitute a committee, obtain committee approval of the topic(s), and begin work on the thesis.
d. Continue “wet lab” training via independent study credits.
e. Continue first year summer research activity.
f. Seek fellowship funding, thesis data collection funding, and/or dissertation pilot research funding.
g. Complete a translation test to fulfill the foreign language requirement (if feasible; this may be delayed).
Year 3:
a. Complete the thesis requirement (a “traditional thesis” or 2-paper option).
b. Present research at one or more academic conferences, possibly results of first year research activity or preliminary thesis findings.
c. Constitute a qualifying exam committee and propose three topics (w/ associated reading lists). At least one—and for most students, two—of the three topics should be related to human evolutionary biology. One topic may be methodological or regional.
d. Take the qualifying exam at the end of the second semester of Year 3.
e. Seek fellowship funding and/or dissertation research funding. At a minimum, dissertation funding should be sought from NSF (DDRIG) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Other possible sources include the American Philosophical Society, Ford Foundation, Leakey Foundation, and National Geographic Society. Plan for 2 submissions to be successful in dissertation grant funding; deadlines are usually at ~6-month intervals.
f. Continue first and second year research activities, including submission of publications.
Year 4:
a. Constitute a PhD Dissertation committee and propose a dissertation topic.
b. Prepare a dissertation prospectus and obtain committee approval of the dissertation plan; present a public colloquium of the dissertation plan; revise the prospectus and obtain committee approval of the final draft.
c. Begin pilot/feasibility research for the dissertation (this may also be accomplished via the first and second year research activities or the Master’s Thesis).
d. Present research at one or more academic conferences (ideally thesis findings).
e. Seek funding for dissertation data collection. At a minimum, this should be sought from NSF (DDRIG) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Plan for 2 submissions to be successful in dissertation grant funding; deadlines are usually at ~6-month intervals.
f. Submit the thesis for at least one publication.
Year 5/6:
a. Continue seeking dissertation funding.
b. Obtain permissions necessary for dissertation data collection (e.g., IRB); collect dissertation data.
c. Continue to publish (first and second year research collaborations, thesis findings, pilot research).
d. Present research at one or more academic conferences.
Final (“Dissertation”) Year:
a. Analyze dissertation data and write dissertation.
b. Begin to submit dissertation findings for publication. Ideally, two papers/chapters will be submitted or in press by the defense.
c. Apply for post-doctoral fellowships, jobs, etc.
d. Publicly defend the dissertation.