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It's Paris, It's Mecca, It's a Dream.
Former students wax poetic when they reflect on their MBL days
"Woods Hole is to scientists what Paris is to artists." a former student writes.
"To biologists. Mecca is at Woods Hole," The Boston Globe announces in a headline over a story about the MBL courses.
"Being here is like a dream.'' a physiology student tells the Globe reporter.
"There is no place like it, not in England, France. Italy or the United States," a leading Britisth biologist tells the same Globe reporter.
Paris. Mecca. A dream. It all sounds romantic, but potential students should be warned that those young scientists who speak so lovingly of their Woods Hole experience didn't spend their days lounging in cafes drinking cappuccino. At the MBL, being a student means being immersed in science, 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day. 6 days a week. Woods Hole may be a scientist's Paris, but a visiting science writer from New York who sat in on one of the courses later told his readers that the MBL is a "boot camp for biologists."
MBL courses are designed for the most promising graduate and post-doctoral students - those young scientists who in a few years will become leading research biologists. The courses offer a package of benefits that the student/scientist cannot find anywhere else:
- superb instruction provided by leading faculty recruited from dozens of the finest institutions in the U.S. and abroad
- remarkably high faculty to student ratios, with some courses approaching a 1:1 ratio
- state-of-the-art equipment
- a range of the latest research techniques, as they are evolving in the most productive labs around the world
- a range of model organisms, marine and non-marine
- a broad perspective on the current areas of research, as they are being shaped in the home labs of the faculty and visiting lecturers
Each course is nestled within the remarkable summer science community composed of the MBL's own resident scientific staff and more than 1,400 visiting scientists and students drawn from well over 300 institutions around the world. Although the students spend 60-80 hours per week working in their own course, they have opportunities to interact with this burgeoning science community through poster sessions, seminars, lectures, and other, informal contacts. A few students each summer are awarded fellowship support to stay on after their course and work with MBL investigators.
And how effective is the MBL's learning-by-immersion philosophy?
"I learned more at the Marine Biological Laboratory in eight weeks than I have since I left," one alumnus reports.
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