For prospective students and interns

FAQ for those who  want to do undertake their PhD with the epic nRIM team:

• How do I apply for PhD in your team? 
  As in all units at OIST, students willing to take PhD with nRIM must go through the general OIST Graduate school PhD application process (more info here). 
• Do you have any formal requirements?
  All students joining nRIM must first join the unit for one rotation, during which it will be seen whether the placement would be beneficial for both student and the lab. There are no formal requirements as to which courses should have been finished; however, please understand that you are expected to have at least some theoretical and practical background in the kind of work you wish to undertake.
• Can I sign up already at the beginning of first year? 
  nRIM makes decisions of which student(s) to take each year only at the end of previous academic year (that is, August of the first academic year). You can indicate your interest of joining the lab earlier but we will only seriously discuss it after you have completed all mandatory first-year rotations (and at least some coursework). 
• What kind of projects can I expect to be involved during a rotation?
  In principle, the rotation projects focus on guiding the student in understanding how scientific thinking is used to construct and answer valid, interesting questions. Rotation students will be expected to actively and independently construct and defend a project idea with a hypothesis and a feasible experimental plan, involving methodology that you either are already familiar with or that can be easily taught within the short rotation period. All students will be involved in discussions related to ethics of science, especially in the context of animal wellbeing.  (Animal handling training will be only be provided for students that aim to be involved in such research.)
  (In exceptional cases where a student explitly needs to learn a method that is well-established in the unit, we can design a project for learning the method. Normally, though, we do not promote methods-first -thinking.)
• What about out-of-field (non-experimental etc) students? 
  OOF students are most welcome! Just don't expect to be doing animal-related experiments if you do not intend to work in such a field. Same rules apply - you will be expected to form a proper scientific question and come up with a plan to answer it during the rotation. 
• How tough will the rotation be? Very tough. ;) Of course you will have to be taking other classes at the same time, but we expect you to find time to attend the weekly lab meetings, journal clubs and mentoring meetings, as well as adjust your days so that you will be able to learn the techniques from nRIM members according to their schedules.
• What about internship? Same thing - you will need to apply through the OIST Internship program . In order to improve your chances to get in, you should have a concrete idea of research you would want to do during the internship, and that idea preferentially should be well-aligned with nRIM aims and resources. Discuss with nRIM PI (yoe) in advance :)

Note: nRIM is not currently actively recruiting new PhD students, but if you are really interested, motivated and can convince us that you should be studying with us, feel free to contact us :)