What the Students Have to Say:

The Core Course

The core course in neuroscience covered a broad range of topics ranging from cell and molecular, systems, and cognitive neuroscience. The instructors were sensitive to the variety of academic backgrounds of the students and made the overall goal to provide us with a broad foundation in neuroscience. The course emphasized critical thinking centered on focused topics with a series of writing assignments, generally of the kind "design an experiment to test". These exercises were extremely beneficial and helped when it came time to write fellowship and thesis proposals. -Scott Murray, Former Graduate Student in the Olshausen Lab The core course is actually a series of three quarter-long courses: one course on Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Systems Neuroscience, and Cognitive Neuroscience. These courses meet 6-10 hours a week, and require that you write several papers and read a lot of journal articles. It is great--the world expert on the thalamus (Ted Jones, past president of the Society for Neuroscience, the guy who literally wrote the book on the subject, "The Thalamus") will stop his lecture, sit down, and spend as long as it takes to answer your question when you raise you hand. The faculty really care that the courses are taught right, and put a lot of time and effort into preparing the syllabi and lecture series. If you've never been in a lecture with six other people, you're in for a treat. -Noah Merin, MD/PhD Student in the Amaral Lab The core-course is all around a great learning experience in that across the year a variety of faculty cover the full range of major issues in Neuroscience -from molecular mechanisms at the synapse to cognitive processes controlling complex behavior. The course is accessible to people arriving with a bachelors in any of the major branch diciplines of neuroscience- but in depth enough to accomplish its goal of giving students the ability to understand recent primary papers in the respective areas. -Andy Huberman, Graduate Student in the Chapman Lab I enjoyed the core course. It taught me about neuroscience and gave me much needed practice to write scientifically and think critically. -Chris Petkov, Graduate Student in the Sutter Lab Back to What the Students Have to Say!