Zach Throckmorton, PhD

Evolutionary anthropologist

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How to succeed in graduate/medical gross anatomy.

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Repetition is the key to anatomy.

Graduate-level dissection-based human gross anatomy is one of the more time-consuming courses in any graduate or medical program. Note I did not say “most difficult,” “most challenging,” or “hardest.” Nothing in gross anatomy is particularly intellectually challenging, at least not initially. Gross anatomy does, however, require discipline and time. I have the privilege of teaching over 200 first year osteopathic medical and MS students every fall, and every fall, students struggle for the same reasons. They are not making effective use of their time, and they spread their studying over too many resources. Well, some of them struggle because they simply don’t bother putting in the time, but if you’re reading this, then that’s probably not your problem!

Here’s what you need to do to succeed in your donated body dissection lab:

1. Read your assigned dissector pages before going to lab. You need to proceed through the assigned dissections as accurately and quickly as possible and knowing your checkpoints and goals is critical. The point of supervised lab time is to have guidance from TAs, fellows, and professors while you are working – get your dissection work done first and study second. Study on your own time. Which leads to point two…

2. For every hour of scheduled lab time, plan on spending at least an hour and a half studying on your own in the lab.

3. When you are studying on your own in lab, do not take a lab list of structures and attempt to find each structure on a single body. This is a terrible waste of time. Instead, write down a dozen structures from your lab list that made frequent appearance in the corresponding lecture(s) on a notecard. Then go find the first structure on a donor, using your dissector and atlas to guide yourself. The first donor you attempt to find the structure on will be challenging and likely take some time. The second donor you go to find the structure on will also take some time. By the time you get to the third and fourth donors, you should be able to find the structure quickly with the aid of the dissector and atlas. When you get to the fifth and sixth donors, you should be able to find the structure quickly and without references. Arguably the most important thing you will learn in your graduate gross anatomy course is an appreciation for anatomical variation. There’s no better way to appreciate variation in, for example, the palmaris longus muscle, than by looking at a dozen forearms, one after the other.

4. Don’t stay in lab finding structures for more than 1.5-2 hours at a time. You do not have the mental stamina to effectively study for longer periods of time. Staying in lab ‘all day’ is a waste of a day! If you need to double up your study time on a given day, then go in the morning and take a break and then come back in the afternoon or evening.

5. Group studying comes after mastering the content by yourself. You need to learn the material well enough that you can lead others. Group studying on the weekend is a great way to reinforce and refresh what you learned on your own during the week.

Studying for gross anatomy lecture is a bit different than preparing in lab:

1. GO TO CLASS.

2. Take notes by hand. You need to start mastering the art of note-taking if you haven’t already. You can type faster than you can think but you think faster than you can write. Taking notes by hand gives your brain time to process what you’re writing down. And you are constantly filtering out less important information. Whether you take notes by hand with pen and paper or take notes by hand with a stylus and Surface Pro does not matter; what matters is that you aren’t trying to transcribe a lecture (which is a terrible waste of effort).

3. Stick with your notes and the professor’s slides. The professor is distilling information down to what is most important (or at least he or she should be!). Use your textbook for definitions, and potentially useful figures and tables, but anatomy texts are terribly boring and dense and it’s probably not worth your time reading whole passages or worse, whole chapters.

4. Don’t start answering exam prep questions from anatomy or board review books until you actually know some of the material. I do not understand why students go through review questions on content they’ve not even learned; answering questions does not teach you the material; answering questions helps you crystallize what you already know.


In general, these four points are important:

1. Meet with your professors in their office hours the first or second week of class, or soon after a new professor starts lecturing. You can learn more about succeeding in the professor’s class in 15 minutes than on your own in hours and hours. (Hopefully. Not all professors are helpful.)

2. Don’t spread yourself thin with resources, and don’t waste time trying to find that one magical resource that will illuminate everything anatomical and save you so much time that you get to party all weekend. There are hundreds of gross anatomy websites, apps, books, YouTube videos, etc. A copy of Gray’s Anatomy 1st Edition from 1858 is all you need to get a good grade in gross anatomy. Yes, humans are still evolving, but 150 or so years isn’t enough time for the human body to have changed that much. Whatever book your instructors assigned will help you get a good grade.

3. Draw anatomy. I have zero drawing/painting/sketching/doodling talent. I can still manage to symbolize anatomical structures with basic geometric shapes. Buy a whiteboard and dry erase markers and draw anatomy to reinforce the relationships between structures. Start by using a figure from your book as a guide, then erase the drawing. Draw as much as you can from memory, then open the book back up and finish it off. Erase it. Draw as much as you can from memory, then open the book back up and finish it off. Erase it. Draw as much as you can from…

4. Students answer questions, and masters ask them. Succinctly, the transition from student to master begins when you know the material well enough to ask questions about it. In the context of a graduate/professional school gross anatomy course, this means you should consider writing your own practice questions. Sitting down, thinking the content through, and creating useful, insightful questions forces you to engage the content in depth. This is where group studying can really pay off – have each member of your group write a few questions for each lecture you’re going to review. Then ask each other your questions. Your peers will provide constructive feedback, and chances are the better questions will be fairly representative of what your instructors might ask on the actual exam. When you have mastered the material so well that you can anticipate exam questions (at least with reasonable approximation), you’re beginning to move beyond being a student.

Please feel free to share your own anatomy study tips with me: throckmorton dot z at gmail dot com.

You make the most important decision of grad school before you start grad school

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I’ve had the opportunity to speak about Homo naledi and my research on this fascinating, newly-discovered hominin at many schools throughout the United States the last few months. Spending time with old friends, making new friends, and meeting lots of interested and enthusiastic students has been a blast! I’m flattered when undergraduates and MS/MA students ask for my advice about pursuing a PhD – which starts with deciding which adviser to work with.

The most important consideration when identifying PhD programs to pursue, and ultimately which one to attend, is your adviser. To paraphrase Horst from the classic Simpsons’ episode Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk, I cannot überemphasize the importance of your doctoral adviser.

Unfortunately, the cringe-worthy experiences of many others whose advisers were worthless or downright damaging are as instructive as my entirely positive path to the PhD. I started at Wisconsin in 2007 and finished in 2013. Across those six years, I saw only two students leave because they weren’t cut out for it intellectually. The vast majority of graduate students who left did so because of their adviser. I can’t give you an exact number but recalling them one by one requires two hands’ worth of fingers. My department is not anomalous in this regard; friends who went to grad school at Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Duke, NYU, Arizona State, etc. all report similar observations. These are not bad programs riddled with bad advisers. But none of them are perfect places, and sometimes two otherwise capable people just don’t get along.

I’ve seen graduate students pick an adviser based primarily on prestige, and avoid an adviser primarily on lack of prestige. Unsurprisingly, these students tend to not be happy, because your adviser’s productivity and brilliance don’t directly relate to how well they advise graduate students. In my experience, research productivity and advising ability really aren’t consistently correlated. Unproductive researchers can be useless advisers, and highly productive researchers can still make time for you. Don’t use CV lines as an important barometer. That said, I firmly believe having an adviser who is at least modestly active is important. Having a finger on the pulse of your field requires at least some activity, and an adviser who is clueless about your field is not going to help you get a job.

I’ve also seen graduate students not apply to work with older and younger advisers. Again, this seems myopic to me. I don’t think your adviser’s age matters much. Younger, untenured professors can be energetic and motivated – but so can older, comfortably tenured professors. However, age can matter in how you relate to your adviser. I’ve seen advisers who are old enough to be their student’s mom or dad act, well, parentally. Is that what you want? I’ve also seen young advisers develop friendships with their graduate students that negatively affected their students’ professional development. Your adviser’s age is simply not that useful in drawing broad inferences. Just be cognizant of what their age might mean to your graduate training.

So how do you figure out which adviser will help you succeed rather than make you want to pull your hair out? It’s pretty simple: you get to know them a bit before you commit. Wow, that sounded like a line from a dating website.

When I was getting ready to apply to PhD programs, I spent hours and hours reading and re-reading papers on the three broad bio anthro topics that interested me most: evo devo, paleoanthropology, and life history. When you narrow down your topics like this, you’ll inevitably start coming across the same names over and over. I applied to study with two people working in each of those areas (six total). I made appointments via email or phone shortly after I sent in my applications. Two never replied to my initial emails and week later phone calls following up. You won’t be surprised to learn that I didn’t consider them any further. Three were within driving distance but one was a flight away.

Of those four potential advisers, the first forgot I was coming, chatted with me for 30 minutes about their committee overload, had a grad student take me to lunch, and did not give me a tour of the department. No thanks!

The second invited me to their home over a break because that was convenient for me, we chatted about our families, what I wanted to study, and was generally very inviting. I ultimately had to pass due to total lack of funding from their school, but had they offered me any amount of money, I might’ve had a difficult decision to make. (More on money in a moment.)

The person I flew to meet spent an hour talking about wine and did not even have a grad student take me to lunch. I couldn’t believe it! Here I am, a near-broke grad student working part time to scrounge up the money to fly out to meet a potential adviser, and it’s a total waste of time. Well, no, it wasn’t a total waste of time – I knew I was absolutely not going to work with them despite attractive funding!

When I visited Wisconsin, my adviser and I chatted about paleoanthropology, our shared academic experiences, research ideas, and many other things I found we had common interests in. I got a personal introduction to the other bio anthro faculty in the department. We also had hamburgers and beer for lunch. To be clear, you don’t need to become friends with your adviser, but you need to at least be able to get along with them.

Arguably the most important decision I had made up to that point in my life was a very easy decision to make, and I succeeded in my graduate training before it started.
I was fortunate to be able to make these trips, but a phone or Skype call is free, and can yield very valuable information. I am shocked when I hear a grad student never met his or her PhD adviser in person. This is, in my opinion, a terrible mistake to make.

There are two other important considerations in choosing your PhD adviser besides how well you get along: track record and money. Find out how many students they’ve accepted and successfully graduated. And after earning their PhD, did their students land postdocs, faculty positions, or other gainful employment? Younger professors will not have an extensive track record. But having produced very few successful graduate students is a yellow flag for middle-aged and older professors.

Finally, we get to the money. Simple: I’ve never met someone finish who was fully funded but had a terrible relationship with their adviser. Conversely, I’ve met many people who had no funding but a great adviser who did finish. Money matters, but not as much as finishing. That said, it’s important to be pragmatic. The average starting salary for a biological anthropologist is not much. Do the math: can you pay off $100,000 in student loan debt at 8% interest making $65,000/year? You can, but you will have a very modest lifestyle.

Here’s my closing thought: Dr. Karen Kelsky (theprofessorisin.com) makes enough money doing your adviser’s job that she quit her post as tenured professor and head of Illinois’ Anthropology Department. There are a lot of terrible advisers out there. Like Indiana Jones at the end of Last Crusade, choose wisely!