A Practical Research Methods Course That Teaches How to Be a Successful Biomedical Engineering Graduate Student

Should your department offer a course on how to be a scientist and a successful graduate student? We offer this course at George Mason University as a mandatory part of the graduate curriculum, but this is not common practice for graduate biomedical engineering programs. Graduate education in biomedical engineering is evolving rapidly, with an increasing demand for fundamental research skills, interdisciplinary skills, and professional development. We believe that graduate students will be more successful in their research activities if they are explicitly taught these skills at the beginning of their graduate coursework. This paper describes the design of this course in our bioengineering department.