Clearly hoping to motivate the students toward a Ph.D., Cech noted that "this country needs people like you standing in front of the classroom, and teaching is largely the activity of Ph.D.s." He acknowledged that many M.D.s do outstanding research, but Cech stressed that "Ph.D.s get highly rigorous research training."

That kind of encouragement, combined with strong mentoring, is what Naira Rezende says helped her decide to pursue a Ph.D. While an undergraduate at CUNY–Hunter College, the Brazil native conducted summer research in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab of HHMI investigator Tania Baker, where she heard about EXROP. The following year, Rezende participated in the program, working in the laboratory of HHMI investigator David Schatz at Yale University. The year after that, she received a 2005 Gilliam fellowship (named after charter HHMI Trustee James H. Gilliam Jr.), which provides up to five years of financial support for graduate study; it is available only to the most competitive EXROP students.

Rezende credits all her mentors with demonstrating that science was a promising career path for her, but she found the example set by Tania Baker as a successful woman in science particularly reassuring. Currently in a Ph.D. program at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Rezende hopes one day to run her own academic research lab.

Research experience gained through EXROP can sometimes tip the balance one way or the other for a student who is deliberating about the future.

For example, Jasmine Ellis spent this summer working in HHMI investigator Morris Birnbaum's lab at the University of Pennsylvania. A Princeton University sophomore, Ellis has her sights set on medical school but sees her EXROP summer as a terrific opportunity to test the research waters. Ethan Sanford, on the other hand, spent his summer working in David Ginsburg's University of Michigan laboratory. Surrounded by M.D.s and Ph.D.s in Ginsburg's lab, Sanford observed that M.D.s who truly wanted to conduct research could do so. That gave this University of Colorado at Boulder graduate, who is eager to choose a path with plenty of patient interaction, the confidence to apply to medical schools.

FOR MORE INFORMATION on the work of Carlos Bustamante's lab, (see A Different Mindset, this issue.)

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