I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students. I am hoping to accept 1-2 students for the coming (2004/05) academic year, but likely will not accept students in the following (05/06) year. Interested students should correspond directly with me (by e-mail and/or regular mail) and may also wish to contact the Graduate Group in Ecology (GGE) to obtain a packet of information and application materials.
Graduate work at Davis is a bit different than many other schools. Ecology students are accepted into a graduate program, not into any particular academic department. Consequently, departments are not financially beholden to students -- this responsibility falls onto the student and their Major Professor. The benefit of this system is that the GGE has a very large number of faculty members with a remarkable array of expertise.
Applications for graduate study are evaluated once per year, in the winter (December 1 deadline) for admission the following fall (late September/ early October). As you might expect, funding is an important issue. Teaching Assistantships are available and provide a good opportunity for most students (these include fee waivers). Additionally, I encourage all students to seek external support. U.S. nationals should consider applying for NSF Predoctoral Fellowships, and foreign students are urged to seek support from their governments and international organizations (e.g., Fullbright and USAID). Serious prospective students should try to arrange to visit Davis and meet other students and faculty who might serve as advisors.
I encourage my students to pursue their own ideas and interest, with the hope that these remain within a realm of science that I can provide guidance. My students design and conduct their own research, although some of these invariably are closely related to my own interests. I believe in the philosophy of my own doctoral mentor (James Brown), who advised me that graduate students are budding colleagues, and should be treated as such, rather than apprentices or employees. I prefer to give advice over instructions. I also encourage interaction with other students, faculty, post-docs, etc., as a great strength of the Davis campus is the tremendous diversity of research programs and people on campus.
The Ph. D. program involves a typical combination of formal coursework (we have a three-course "graduate core curriculum"), informal interactions (there are several seminars, journal clubs, and discussion groups), and research. Typically a student takes courses and tries out research ideas during the first year or two, and then concentrates on the thesis research. A doctoral thesis typically consists of three to five chapters, each written for publication as a paper in the scientific literature. Limited funds for graduate student research are available, and most students are able to secure enough support to complete excellent thesis projects.
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