More is more?

The Wellcome Trust's four-year PhD scheme is growing in popularity, but how much difference does that extra year really make?


In 1994, the Wellcome Trust broke with tradition and awarded the University of Liverpool a grant to set up a new-style PhD programme: instead of the conventional three-year PhD, the new programme provided four years of training for PhD students studying cellular and molecular physiology. The extra year was designed as a 'foundation' year, in which students rotated between different laboratories and received training in a range of scientific and other skills, before embarking on their three-year PhD project proper in years 2-4.

The award was made as a step towards addressing widespread concerns about the quality of postgraduate researchers emerging from traditional three-year PhD programmes in the UK. There was a general feeling that this was in part because students were not receiving enough training and research experience during their undergraduate degree to prepare them for a doctoral course.

Moreover, students found themselves having to make one of the most important decisions of their career without sufficient knowledge to base it on. Most had to choose a PhD project with limited experience of the subject area, and a laboratory and a supervisor with no experience of either. A wrong decision at this point could end an entire research career, since, understandably enough, no one wants to spend three years on a notoriously low salary, doing a project they don't enjoy, with a supervisor they don't get on with.

Following two successful intakes on the Liverpool programme, the Trust invited other universities to compete for funding to set up their own four-year programmes, making awards to four universities in 1996, and another seven in October 2000. Each university developed its programme around a particular scientific theme, and recruited students onto it. Although the structure of the programmes varies slightly from university to university, the extra 'foundation' year is integral to all. As well as gaining experience working in several different laboratories in this first year, students receive a significant amount of formal training. This includes technical training in complex or specialized areas such as statistics or experimental design, and training in the 'transferable skills', including effective communication, grant writing, presentation and negotiation, that are essential to any career.

With the last approved intake to all 12 programmes set for October 2003, the scheme was recently reviewed by an independent panel of external scientific experts, who assessed reports - including justification for continued support - from the directors of all 12 programmes. On the basis of this review, all 12 programmes were awarded a further five years' funding from October 2004.

An informed choice
The review highlighted the advantages of the foundation year to students. The technical training and the breadth of experience students gained on their laboratory rotations enabled them to make a more rational, informed decision about their three-year PhD project.

Luke Chamberlain - who joined the first four-year PhD programme at the University of Liverpool in 1994 and was the first student to be awarded his PhD in July 1998 - is a case in point. "I didn't know what subject I wanted to study for the PhD. I knew I wanted to do cell biology, but my honours degree was in microbiology," he says. "The experience of rotating between labs in my first year, talking to people working on different aspects of cell biology, and seeing the diversity of approaches you can take to solve different problems, helped me make an informed decision about my PhD project, and I stuck with that area of research. The whole structure of the four-year programme is for people like me, who come from a different discipline and haven't done much practical work in their honours degree."

Dr Chamberlain feels this influenced the direction of his entire career. "If I hadn't done the four-year scheme I may well have gone into a subject I didn't know much about, and may not have stayed interested in. That can finish a science career." Happily, that didn't happen and Dr Chamberlain has continued a flourishing relationship with science and the Wellcome Trust: he commenced his Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship at the University of Glasgow in October 2003.

Rotating between different laboratories also helps students make an informed choice of supervisor for their main PhD project - based on first-hand knowledge of that supervisor's personality, working methods, and the general atmosphere in his or her laboratory. Indeed, another unique feature of the four-year scheme - the award of the studentship under the sponsorship of the Programme, with the student selecting supervisor and project - places considerable 'consumer power' in the hands of the students, particularly as supervisors are keen to teach such high-calibre students.

An unexpected and exciting offshoot of the first year of laboratory rotations and skills training is the number of multidisciplinary projects students devise. Many choose a main PhD project that combines work in two laboratories, using different techniques to address important problems in novel ways. This is in strong contrast with the kind of projects undertaken by students, many on traditional three-year schemes, who, due to time pressure and lack of experience and training, may be given 'safer' projects.

Innovation
A similar degree of innovation characterizes not only students' choice of project, but also the imaginative ways in which they approach it. Unlike three-year PhD students, who tend to have much less input into how their main project is constructed, most students on four-year programmes are involved in writing and defending their own research proposal at the end of the first year.

The broader perspective, both of their subject and of what is experimentally feasible, gained during their first year - along with the fact that many of them have moved from a different scientific field into their present area of study - gives these students a distinct intellectual approach. They are more willing to try new things, having been exposed to so many different techniques during their rotations.

Having been trained in many of the relevant techniques, had the benefit of valuable practical research experience and, perhaps most importantly of all, developed in confidence, four-year students are much better prepared overall when they start their PhD projects. This means they can hit the ground running, and start doing worthwhile experiments on day one, rather than taking several months to find their feet.

Outputs
Although it is still early days, those students on the other five programmes who have been awarded their PhDs and are working as postdoctoral researchers have a notably higher publication rate than their three-year counterparts. However, this could simply reflect the fact that the four-year programme attracts exceptionally gifted entrants to start with (three-quarters of four-year PhD students had first-class honours degrees).

To control for this possibility, Professor David Attwell, Director of the Four-year Programme in Neuroscience at University College London (UCL), compared the published output of four-year students with the output of those who they made an offer to, but took up places elsewhere. The results showed a significantly higher output by the four-year students: six years after starting their PhD at UCL, four-year PhD students had published an average of five papers, while the three-year students had published an average of three.

Young as they are, the Wellcome Trust's Four-year PhD Programmes have already made an impact elsewhere in the UK. The Universities of Leeds and Cambridge have requested permission for other students to train alongside the four-year students. The Universities of Manchester and Edinburgh, and the International Spinal Research Trust at University College London, have all set up new four-year programmes using the Trust's programme as a model. The Government has also recognized the value of a longer period of training, and has increased its funding to extend the average length of PhD funding to three-and-a-half years. In addition, the UK Research Councils have introduced a number of combined Masters in Research/PhD programmes.

If this ripple effect, both on students' future careers and other PhD programmes in UK research institutions continues, the Wellcome Trust's four-year PhD scheme will have played a small but significant role in ensuring the UK continues to produce world-class scientists that help to maintain its world standing in biomedical research. PB

The four-year programmes

Cambridge: Developmental Biology
Cambridge: Infection and Immunity
Dundee: Molecular and Cellular Biology
Edinburgh: Cellular and Molecular Basis of Disease
Glasgow: Molecular Functions in Disease
Imperial: Molecular and Cellular Basis of Infection
Leeds: Molecular Basis of Biological Mechanisms
Liverpool: Cellular and Molecular Physiology
Manchester: Biochemistry of Cellular Systems
Oxford: Neuroscience
Oxford: Structural Biology: From molecules to cells
University College London: Neuroscience

[brokenlink] Four-year PhD Training Programmes: Scheme details

Dr Luke Chamberlain at the University of Glasgow: Research interests

top