By Kara McCormack (University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill)
Information
In my biostatistics seminar course, students create collaborative podcast episodes to reflect on guest speaker presentations from biostatistics professionals on their career journeys across industry, government, non-profit, and academia. Working in self-selected groups of 3-4, students record 6-7 minute conversational podcasts after each set of presentations, synthesizing their reflections and discussing how the presentations inform their own career trajectories. The podcast approach reintroduces a human element into the learning process, requiring students to synthesize notes in their own voice. A key goal of the podcasts is also to help students connect the content in the seminars to their own career trajectories, and grading reflects this. While AI tools such as GoogleNotebookLM can produce podcast-style summaries of notes, this bypasses the student’s own cognitive processes, such as distilling complex ideas and making meaning from course content, and also bypasses the personal connection to the student’s journey in biostatistics. The podcast assignment is integrated throughout the one-credit graduate course where students hear from 15-20 biostatistics professionals across diverse career paths. Students complete podcasts approximately every 2-3 weeks, allowing them to synthesize multiple presentations at once. This approach translates readily into statistics and data science courses, where students may create podcasts to reflect on learning throughout a project: documenting decisions made, obstacles encountered, and insights gained. The podcast approach supports the analytical process itself and fosters metacognitive awareness alongside technical skills. This was implemented at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, a public R1 research university. The course is BIOS 691: Biostatistics Careers Seminar with primarily undergraduate students (juniors and seniors) and MS students in Biostatistics (1st and 2nd year), but also a small number of biostatistics PhD students & PhD students in other concentrations (e.g. Epidemiology). There is a mix of domestic and international students (about 50/50) with varying levels of clarity about career goals (some know exactly what they want; others are exploring). Class size ranges from 60-90 students per semester. This is often students' first structured exposure to the breadth of biostatistics career options. Many enter the course focused primarily on academic or pharmaceutical careers and leave with awareness of paths they hadn't considered. The course fills a critical gap in graduate training, where technical content can often overshadow professional development. Evidence of efficacy was obtained by a survey at the end of the semester, asking students to reflect on the process of collaborating on podcasts.