C4L Requirements
C4L students do have more specific requirements than those required of general CCIB students, but enrolling in C4L should not extend your time-to-degree. As a trainee in the C4L track, you would need to participate in the different activities detailed below:
As a C4L trainee, you will be required to take one course from each of the following clusters:
- Proteins
- e.g. Protein Structure & Function (56:115:522, offered in even years during the Spring semester), Molecular Biophysics (56:121:560)
- Genomes
- e.g. Genome Informatics(56:121:552, Spring semester), Evolutionary Genetics (offered in even year Fall semesters)
- Artificial Intelligence
- e.g. Artificial Intelligence (56:198:514, offered in odd-year Fall semesters), Machine Learning (56:198:554 offered in even year Fall semesters)
- Software Development
- e.g. Data Structures and Algorithms (56:198:501 Spring semester) + a software engineering workshop, Software Engineering (50:198:423)
- Codes for Life Seminar (56:121:605) Weekly seminar series offered in Fall and Spring semesters. C4L track students will be required to take 2 semester of C4L Seminar. All NRT Fellows are expected to attend seminar.
Any courses that count toward C4L requirements also count toward your CCIB course requirements. Students can request a waiver which will be reviewed by C4L PIs.
As a STEM graduate student, it is easy to feel like your training activities are driven by your advisor’s or program’s whims, with some annual input from your committee. It might be hard to see how they relate to your career goals, or it might feel like you are missing some critical skills that your current training environment doesn’t provide.
Starting Summer 2022, you and your advisor will need to create an Individual Development Plan (IDP) to align your training activities to your needed skills, interests, and values. Your IDP will be based on the structure provided by Science Careers https://myidp.sciencecareers.org/. You and your faculty advisor will also need to annually assess how well you are following your IDP.
Beginning in Fall 2022, C4L trainees are required to participate in at least two professional development activities per semester. These include CCIB-hosted workshops as well as many other eligible workshops that are advertised on the #workshop-and-training slack channel. While the CCIB professional development curriculum is designed to be very flexible, as a C4L student you may also have specific workshop requirements outlined in your IDP.
Beginning in Summer 2023, C4L students will also need to attend communal C4L gatherings, such as the monthly C4L seminar, the annual C4L symposia, and periodic sponsored public outreach activities.
Ethics are important for everyone, but they are especially important for the individuals who are going to be shaping the scientific landscape for generations. As a participant in a National Research Traineeship, NSF expects that you might be one of those people! Wherever your ethics are at the moment, you’ll need to level-up by participating in an ethics learning community during one semester.
Modern science is a team activity! As a C4L student, like most STEM graduate students, you will naturally need to carry out some of your research aims as part of a team. Teams of C4L trainees, however, will get to do a regular structured self-assessment on how well they are working as a team. Typically you will need to self-assess on six metrics every six months, and the team leader (usually your PI, but not always!) will review the assessment with the other members of the C4L development team.
Writing robust software that is easily useable by other scientists requires professional discipline that most academic scientists aren’t trained in. If you are a post-qualifying C4L Ph.D. student, beginning in Fall 2023 you will have industry professional(s) as part of your training team. More specifically, you will be assigned a mentor experienced in scientific software development. (The C4L PIs are jealous!) Your mentor will work with you on your own code over a period of six months and will give you specific assignments to improve your code to meet field standards for open-source or industry-developed software. Your job is to follow your industry mentors advice and improve your software as they suggest! Interested students may be able to pursue an industry internship instead, but each internship has additional prerequisites.
C4L is an experiment! And we will need to get regular feedback from students on how we are doing. C4L students are expected to respond to a reasonably-lengthed survey and (very occasionally) do interviews with social scientists who are evaluating C4L.