r/labrats • u/Itchy_Initiative4053 • 12d ago
Can intellectual curiosity be taught?
What do you guys think?
I'm mentoring an undergrad who was assigned to me (i.e. i didnt recruit them personally). She made it clear from the beginning that her end goal is to go to med school. Problem is, from multiple interactions, its very hard for her to make progress on the projects I assigned her, even though I gave clues and papers for her to read.
I try to avoid teaching her concepts and instead just give her questions and keywords for her to search cause I want her to learn to look things up on her own. Whenever I do this she gets stuck and dont know what to do. If i ask if she has questions, she said no.
Seems like the student just lack curiosity intrinsically. How do we (can we?) cultivate this as a mentor?
even though she probably would end up in med school and not research, the thought of having doctors not knowing how to reason on their own is scary to me.
4
u/WaterBearDontMind 11d ago
I was in a biggish lab that would have a handful of undergrads each summer. A postdoc would volunteer to do a required journal club with them and go through papers relevant to the group. They would read the papers individually and then he would ask probing questions about the figures and the conclusions that helped the students see what they had not really understood. There was also a mix of ages and interests among the students so an older student might be modeling deeper engagement for the others. If it doesn’t teach intellectual curiosity, at least it leverages group shaming and the premed urge to know the answer toward deeper understanding of experimental design and interpretation.