Ohio University alum Adriane Lam (M.S. 2015) was profiled this week in Nature in a story headlined “Meet the supervisors who helped to shape four scientists’ careers.”
Lam, who is now a Ph.D. candidate in geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, discussed the positive impact of the advising she received in OHIO’s M.S. in Geological Sciences program.
Adriane Lam
In her interview, she told faculty to “push your students. Many of us are afraid to step outside our comfort zones. Give us opportunities to grow as scientists.” And she talked about how her master’s adviser, Dr. Alycia Stigall, pushed her.
During my master’s-degree programme, my supervisor, Alycia Stigall, knew when to push me and when to leave me alone. I was doing a lot of modelling and I always had coding problems. I would complain to Alycia, and she would say: “You can figure it out.” And I always would. I needed a push at that point.
I have published several papers with Alycia, including one with two other alumni of the Stigall lab. Each time, we had an open and honest conversation about the authorship list. She showed me that advisers should have conversations about the authorship protocol when they publish with students, because author order can cause contention among lab members.
Alycia also taught me the value of working with the public, and we did a lot of volunteering together. We visited grade-school students, went to a U.S. national forest to chat about fossils with the public and ran a workshop with teachers at the Cincinnati Museum Center in Ohio. My outreach experiences led me to realize that I love teaching geological concepts to people of all ages and backgrounds.
Dr. Alycia Stigall
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