WELCOME

If you are a student interested in applying for graduate study in my lab, you need to have the following: (1) ability to work in a diverse and fast-paced environment; (2) strong technical and quantitiatve skills; (3) desire to work hard and work in multidisciplinary groups.

Generally, students with combined GRE scores of 1100 or greater and TEOFFL scores that exceed university minimums are encouraged to apply.

I ask that you drop me an email (bpijanow@purdue.edu) to express your interest in studying with me. If possible, a meeting or phone conversation will be necessary as well.

Please visit the departmental graduate student application web site for futher details on application procedures and deadlines.

- Bryan Pijanowski

GRADUATE TEACHING PRINCIPLES

Graduate students in my lab are being taught guided by the following principles:

1. It takes a community. Complex problems require collaborative multidisciplinary approaches and multiple sources of knowledge. We will embrace a learning community comprised of students with different backgrounds but bound by a common set of problems that we are attempting to address. We will embrace the diversity of the knowledge, methods, and values of multiple disciplines and viewpoints to generate new understanding and produce graduates who can work across disciplines. We will support the development and maintenance of a learning community for studying and solving natural resource problems using formal and informal means and advanced technologies and scientific discoveries.

2. Diversity enhances learning. A key goal is to produce global citizens who are not only comfortable working on teams comprised of members from diverse disciplines, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and geographic regions but who recognize the inherent value in such teams. Our learning community will explicitly rely upon the diversity of our academic disciplines, institutions involve in research, faculty, students, and geographic regions to further research and educational goals.

3. Students need to apply what they’ve learned in career-based situations. Students have the ability to “apply curriculum-based knowledge to career-based situations”. In the absence of opportunities to test their knowledge, students may be unable to accurately assess their knowledge level until after they graduate. A major goal of the FNR graduate research program is to not only train students but also to provide students with situations similar to those they will face during their career so that they can use and evaluate their training.

4. One size does not fit all. One needs to recognize that we all are likely to vary substantially in our cultural and educational backgrounds, aptitudes, research interests, and career goals. Although common approaches will be used to professional development, education, etc., we also recognize that each person needs to develop differently and does so at different paces, in different directions and with a different set of skillsets at the start and end of their program. In other words, we are all not meant to be “clones” of our advisor, but to develop skills that make one valuable to society and self-fulfilled.

5. Successful programs rely on self-examination and adaptive management. We are interested not only in advancing our understanding of how to solve natural resource problems but also in advancing our understanding of how we learn. We need to regularly examine the success of approaches to learning in our lab and make adjustments as necessary. We are after all educators and we need to understand how learning and discovery work together.

6. Everyone is an ambassador. Your composure, knowledge and treatment of others reflects on everyone in the lab, the department and, when interacting with the public, the public’s presentations of scientists relative to other professionals and non-professionals.