The Synaptic Sketch (a blog)

  • 10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Selecting a Graduate Program

    10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Selecting a Graduate Program

    Congratulations! It’s mid-December and you’ve just pressed “submit” on your graduate applications. The hardest part is over, and now it’s time for you to sit back and … well, now what? Believe it or not, some graduate schools may be calling you in early January to set-up interviews with you. So for one, start taking

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  • To the scientific women who mentored me: Thank you.

    published at The Xylom My growth depended on the myriad of women who mentored me, inspired me, and invested years into my development as a critical thinker. They valued me as a scientist and challenged me to think of myself as one. They made room for me in the pipeline.  Although I can’t formally acknowledge

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  • Help Us Patch the Pipeline

    Help Us Patch the Pipeline

    We need to talk about implicit bias in STEM. At first, my mom wasn’t sure if she should name me ‘Victoria’ or ‘Sydney’. Privy to prejudices, she understood that a gender-neutral name could help inoculate her daughter against the discrimination she may face in her future career. Today I am a first-year neuroscientist seeking a

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  • GRE scores don’t correlate with graduate school success

    “When I get students in the lab…I will warn them that the skills that made them academically bright are not going to be the skills that will help them as scientists”-Dr. Daniel Colón-Ramos; Yale Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology Each year, graduate admissions committees rely on Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) scores as an “objective”

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