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America COMPETES, the NSF reauthorization bill, has been signed into law, and the bill contains a lot of good stuff. Many of the provisions I wrote about earlier have survived the conference committee and made it through to the final bill:
SEC. 7008. POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOWS.
(a) Mentoring- The Director shall require that all grant applications that include funding to support postdoctoral researchers include a description of the mentoring activities that will be provided for such individuals, and shall ensure that this part of the application is evaluated under the Foundation's broader impacts merit review criterion. Mentoring activities may include career counseling, training in preparing grant applications, guidance on ways to improve teaching skills, and training in research ethics.
(b) Reports- The Director shall require that annual reports and the final report for research grants that include funding to support postdoctoral researchers include a description of the mentoring activities provided to such researchers.
- Communication skills: The Scientific Communications Act got folded in but without any funding. I don't know if a "sense of Congress" statement has any real weight.
SEC. 7035. SENSE OF CONGRESS ON COMMUNICATIONS TRAINING FOR SCIENTISTS.
(a) Sense of Congress- It is the sense of Congress that institutions of higher education receiving awards under the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program of the Foundation should, among the activities supported under these awards, train graduate students in the communication of the substance and importance of their research to nonscientist audiences.
(b) Report to Congress- Not later than 3 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Director shall transmit a report to the Committee on Science and Technology of the House of Representatives and to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions of the Senate, describing the training programs described in subsection (a) provided to graduate students who participated in the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program. The report shall include data on the number of graduate students trained and a description of the types of activities funded.
IGERT received a big chunk of money - $82M for 2009 Professional Science Masters programs got modest funding ($12M in 2009), but they are spending it on smart things: (1) a program to help PSM programs share information to make it easier for new PSM programs to be established, and (2) establishing evaluation procedures for existing and new programs.
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NIH training fellowships have always included things like that -- remember the "scientific ethics" craze of the mid 90's? There's no accountability or specific requirements and programs might (or might not) hold a two hour group program once a year. I'd be astonished if these provisions have any practical effect at all, except maybe getting grad students a few more free pizzas.
I assume you are referring just to the postdoc mentoring and scientific communications provisions. I'm not sure how much good the communications provision will do, but I think the mentoring provision is valuable. Here's why:
First, the broad impacts information is used in deciding whether a grant gets funded or not (though I doubt it has very much weight), so people will need to tell a good story. Having a postdoc office at the institution provides an easy out for PIs - they can just write something about the things the office will do for the postdoc. If offices are smart, they'll distribute boilerplate text that can be used for just such a purpose. That in turn I think will generate support (or at least grudging tolerance) within institutions for postdoc offices, which are by no means universal. I think it will speed creation of such offices.
Second, it makes an explicit statement that mentoring is an expected part of the postdoc experience. That's a small step towards formalization and professionalization of the postdoc. Ultimately, I think the postdoc will evolve toward a grad-school-like structure. There will be different levels of structure, of course, and different milestones and expected tasks, but still clear goals and steps towards those goals. I think it's a good direction to be heading in.