What is a grad group?
Graduate groups are an institution unique to the UC Davis campus. They have arisen to meet the challenge of graduate education in various fields where we have great strength in a number of departments. Besides the Graduate Group in Ecology, we have graduate groups in Genetics, Population Biology, and Animal Behavior, to name a few. From a student’s point of view, the virtue of graduate groups is that they are much more flexible than departmental graduate programs. Departmental programs encourage students to tap the resources of the department whereas graduate groups feel much freer to cross departmental and disciplinary boundaries. In the case of the Graduate Group in Ecology, a 100-plus faculty from twenty-some departments give students direct access to a very broad and deep faculty resource. We also have no difficulty with students taking courses from faculty outside the group or from putting such faculty on advisory, qualifying, and thesis committees. We can tailor a student’s training rather precisely to support their thesis work and other career objectives. Students, particularly social science students, often fear that a degree in Ecology will handicap them on the job market, but this is not the case. Though some disciplinary departments in the social sciences are rigid in this regard, increasingly mainline disciplinary programs (in addition to the growing number of interdisciplinary faculties that are taking root in universities across the world) favor broadly-trained applicants. Our good students are getting good jobs. See Alumni section for details.