Nathaniel Daw

One quip I heard when I was a prospective student was that graduate school (for better or worse) can be like attending a tiny university, run by your advisor. And it's true, grad school differs from what came before in that students' activities are usually much more confined -- if not to a single lab, then certainly to a single department. The great thing about the CNBC is that, in a number of ways, it has helped me to be part of something much bigger.

I'm part of a computer science department, but I have spent a good chunk of the past two years in another lab, in another department, in another university, recording striatal neurons from behaving rats in order to test some computational theories I've worked on. Knowing how things are supposed to work, I'm rather astonished that this could happen at all. But the CNBC enabled it through its IGERT training program, providing not just funding for the project but (just as importantly) the sort of institutional support necessary to smoothly bridge such practical obstacles as cross-university equipment purchases and animal use approval -- and probably many more I don't even know about.

Earlier in my graduate career, coursework was more prominent than research, but the story was otherwise similar. The CNBC allowed me to get credit toward my computer science degree for taking its core set of courses in neuroscience and neuropsychology. I needed such an educational foundation for the interdisciplinary research I wanted to do, but it would have been quite difficult to obtain had the CNBC not provided appropriate courses, and again, the institutional support to weave them seamlessly into my program. Needless to say, I have also benefited from computational courses taught in my own department -- as, incidentally, have students from other areas that the CNBC has brought in.

Indeed, CNBC programs have allowed me to interact with a strikingly broad community -- psychologists, philosophers, statisticians and physiologists. I have particularly learned a great deal from students in all of these areas, at CNBC courses and retreats and through the student talk series, in which we take turns presenting our research for one another. (The CNBC buys dinner.) My computer science department is large and varied and one of the best in the world, and even buys me dinner occasionally, but no department can, by itself, offer all this.