Student Perspective: Elena Ezhkova

My favorite course during the fall term was Scientific Ethics and Exposition (SEE). Although it is a unique course for a graduate school, I think it is one of the most important. The format of the course consists of discussions between students and faculty, giving oral presentations, and writing assignments. During discussions, we highlighted many ethical issues that often appear in scientific life, such as the sharing of research material and information, scientific misconduct, paper authorship. The ability to give presentations is an important skill for scientists. By studying examples of scientific presentations at CSHL we learned what is important for a good talk. The most challenging part of SEE for me was the written assignments, where we wrote requests for reagents or prepared an abstract for a meeting. I received help and advice from the instructors and my new skills will definitely help in my scientific life.