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In 2013, when Wendy Ingram was a fourth-year graduate student in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, a classmate became severely depressed, took a leave of absence from the program, and eventually committed suicide. Ingram and her friends were more than shocked. “We were devastated, and we were frustrated,” says Ingram, now a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University. “We saw gaps in care and gaps in knowledge and gaps in understanding of what would have been helpful things to do.”
Spurred by that heartbreaking loss, Ingram and eight classmates in UC Berkeley’s Molecular Cell Biology (MCB) program created the MCB Graduate Network. The graduate student–led group organizes students-only discussions targeted to each year of graduate training, where seasoned students talk with less-advanced colleagues about navigating the big milestones of that year, such as picking a lab or taking a ...
