Defining success in graduate school.

To the Editor: As graduates of the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF) Tetrad program from the matriculating classes of 1992–1996, we read with interest a recently published Perspective entitled “How Should We Be Selecting Our Graduate Students?,” written by fellow alumnus and classmate Orion Weiner (Weiner, 2014 ). The author, who is now a member of the UCSF Tetrad faculty and cochair of graduate admissions, reported that success in this graduate program over the past 20 years correlated with years of undergraduate research experience and Graduate Record Examination (GRE) subject scores but did not correlate with other commonly used admissions metrics, such as undergraduate grades, general GRE scores, or ranking of the undergraduate institution. We applaud the author for taking on the important challenge of examining predictors of success in graduate school in the life sciences. As alumni of the program, however, we wish to respond to a number of issues, including the design and execution of the study and the implications of its conclusions. Most importantly, we propose a new, broader definition of success in graduate school. Our aim is to promote a discussion about meaningful, reliable, and scientific ways to define, analyze, and evaluate success in bioscience graduate programs.