There are many things I need to thank my graduate program, the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Graduate Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, for. But definitely, topping that list will be Foundation Conference, a mandatory 4-credit course taken in the first semester of the 5-year program.
Foundation Conference gives a callow, nervous first-year the guts to take a paper like "IRE1a Induces Thioredoxin-Interacting Protein to Activate the NLRP3 Inflammasome and Promote Programmed Cell Death under Irremediable ER Stress", and tackle every single sentence, data point, every aspect of a figure and figure legend. And the experience is so useful that even today, 7 years later, I remember what that course taught me about reading a paper: read the title, read the abstract and the introduction, then skip the results, read the discussion, come back to the introduction, read the results, go through the materials and methods and re-read the discussion. An incredibly long process that can make you want to tear your hair out, but a very, very useful and a solid way of tearing apart a paper. And if done right, you probably will not forget any aspect of the paper ever again.
Despite its obvious advantages, Foundation Conference is only offered by the Med School. The Graduate School of Public Health, for example, although offering PhD programs in related biomedical fields, does not have anything like it. GSPH offers a first-years-only journal club, but this is a joint session for all first years and by that nature, cannot offer what Conference can: separate groups of 4-5 students per faculty member, individual attention by senior faculty, a forum where every single student has to present his or her understanding of the paper every single week and is forced to read a paper thoroughly because the faculty randomly pick people to answer questions beyond just the whats and hows of a paper. In our batch, we were 45 first-years. So the school would have had to come up with at least 10 interested and dedicated faculty members who would be willing to plow through each assigned paper, and not to mention, all the written reports by the students, for a whole semester. It's intense.
So thank you, Foundations Conference. I need to read the above-mentioned paper by noon today and although I might grit my teeth and groan out aloud, I think I'll get through it.
