MCDB Graduate Student Handbook
After presentation and discussion of the research proposal, the Doctoral committee will ask a series of questions intended to test your level of sophistication in biology. Your Doctoral committee members may ask you specific or very broad, almost philosophical questions, in any area they feel you should have competence. Primarily, your Doctoral committee will be looking for evidence that you have advanced your level of understanding of biology beyond what you were expected to know as an undergraduate. A common problem in this part of the exam is that students tend to answer questions at the level of undergraduate courses they have recently TA'ed rather than at a graduate level. If you are asked a question to which you do not know the answer, say so. No one is expected to know everything. On the other hand, you may want to try to reason your way through to an answer. Thinking on one's feet is a very important trait in a developing scientist, and your Doctoral committee will likely be very impressed if you can do so.
While it is difficult to prepare for this section of the exam, there are a few strategies you may find helpful. You may want to start by reviewing your notes from graduate and advanced undergraduate courses, and then ask yourself, "What have I learned about this topic since I took this course?" If you have learned nothing new, make an attempt to update your knowledge. An efficient way to do this is to read published reviews on specific topics. Ask other graduate students, post-docs, or faculty members for recommendations about good recent reviews. It is also important that you keep current with recently published literature. This is probably the area in which graduate students tend to be weakest. They tend to read only what applies in a very immediate way to their thesis research. As an absolute minimum, students in this Program will be expected to be familiar with important articles, on any topic in Molecular, Cell or Developmental Biology, that appear in recent issues of major scientific journals. You will find that important ideas for your own research often come from reading about experiments carried out in other fields. Reading the literature broadly is part of what scientists do, and you must begin developing these habits now. UCLA is very rich in seminar series covering a wide range of topics relevant to the research interests of this Division. All of these seminars (not courses), from six or seven different departments, are advertised in the weekly bulletin entitled "Events at UCLA in Molecular Biology and Related Subjects" are emailed to students by the Student Affairs Office. Check the bulletin and, each week, try to attend at least one seminar that is not directly related to your research.