Robert Drummond, an M.D./Ph.D. candidate in The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's cellular and molecular medicine program, became interested in going to medical school while he was majoring in biology at Morehouse College in 1998.

So, to achieve his dream, he joined pre-med organizations on campus and got to find out about the Undergraduate Training in Academic Research (U*STAR) Awards program, which is run by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences' Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) activity ( http://www.nigms.nih.gov/about_nigms/more.html ).

In 2000, Drummond was one of 24 students selected from a national applicant pool — including students from historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving Institutions — to do research with Yale's Biomedical Science Training and Enrichment Program (BioSTEP). The program was funded by grants from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.

At the end of intensive, 10-week summer training in which he studied "In-vitro Mineralization of Metatarsal Cartilage, Rudiment from col2-bcl2 Mice" in laboratories at the Yale School of Medicine, Drummond "fell in love with research and…decided to pursue an M.D. and a Ph.D."

Students accepted into M.D./Ph.D. programs are, in most instances, supported with a tuition waiver, stipend, and health insurance. These are no small benefits. Once Drummond graduates, he will be one of 200 to 300 M.D./Ph.D.s graduating from medical school with little or no debt.

Elusive Goal Lines

But one disadvantage for such students, according to observers, is time. The M.D./Ph.D. program typically takes eight to 10 years to complete.

"I have heard of students spending up to nine years working on their Ph.D.," says Drummond. "About year five, they realize their project was a dead end, [or] experiments aren't working, experiments [are] taking longer [than expected] to get started. These are all obstacles that can determine whether a Ph.D. can actually take two years or six to seven years."

Is getting saddled with a dead-end project a likely possibility for him?

"It can happen," Drummond replies, "because if you're setting up an experiment, you're going into uncharted territory; not a lot of work has been done. You're kind of being the pioneer of that research; you're the one making those initial mistakes. And although something good may come 10 to 15 years from now…there's a likely possibility that you'll lose a lot of time, and you could end up in a dead end."

Drummond says his hope, however, is that his mentor, Peter Agre, who has "made biomedical research his life's work" and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, would have "the wherewithal and experience to say, 'OK. Looking at this project, I see where we've been going, and maybe we'll cut this short and move on.' "

Backup Plan for Graduation

Victor Acosta, 23, majored in physics at Augsburg, a small, liberal arts college in Minneapolis. Now a graduate student with the University of California, Berkeley Physics Department, Acosta says he worries that his experiment won't go as planned and that he might "end up being here for eight-plus years, like some grad students I've met."

A doctoral program is a five- to eight-year commitment, academic observers say. But "graduating in a timely fashion" is, like for Acosta, Ivette Shiba Estay's biggest concern.

Estay, a second-year candidate in the Department of Dermatology's Cancer Biology Ph.D. program at Stanford University, is doing research on molecular causes of a basal cell carcinoma, the most common skin cancer. Most cancer research, Estay says, is very competitive.

"You're always going to have a competing group, and you always run the risk of getting scooped: someone publishing your work before you do, and you have to start from scratch again," she explains.

Estay says graduate students have to be very vigilant about other research that's going on.

"You have to definitely know what your competitors are doing; know the literature, who's doing what," she says. Breaking those cardinal research rules means, "You might have to backtrack, if you don't have a backup project," says Estay.

The best defense, she says, is having that backup project, one with a high likelihood of success.

"That's a way for graduate students to arm themselves against pitfalls that can occur," she says.

Big Odds in Academia

Kimberly Fowler is a Ph.D. candidate in cell biology at Yale University and a Tennessee State University MARC fellow. Her goal is to teach.

Fowler says her concern is "the slowly decreasing backup of the pipeline to academic careers, especially for women." She sees a huge discrepancy between the number of Ph.D. graduates and the number of faculty jobs available.

Numbers from the National Science Foundation reveal a bleak picture for minority women aspiring to be college professors: Of 53,880 female science or engineering doctorate-holders employed in universities and four-year colleges, there are 11,550 white female full professors, 12,740 white female associate professors, and 13,700 white female assistant professors. Black females make up 2,670 of the total, with about 350 holding full professorships, 650 serving as associate professors, and 840 as assistant professors. Comparable figures for the 2,500 Hispanic female university employees are 419, 460, and 800.

Lydia Villa-Komaroff, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and the third Mexican-American woman in the United States to receive a doctorate in the sciences, is founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) and vice president for research and COO of Whitehead Institute.

In an article on the employment situation for women in science, Dr. Villa-Komaroff said although she has seen increased numbers of women in academic science since the 1970s, the industrial workplace may be more female-scientist friendly, in some respects, than academe. In a report on ethnographic inquiry, researchers said "underlying cause of women's difficulties lies in the structured incapacity of the traditional science, math and engineering system to meet the educational needs of a diverse student population."

Making Time to Have Children

Estay says the difficulty she sees for women in science is planning family and careers.

"Women here [at Stanford] have commented that there is no good time to have a child. You have to just fit it in," says Estay.

In an article titled, "Women in Science Redux," published in Harvard Magazine in 2001, Sara Houghteling, now a Fulbright Advanced Student, wrote, "With doctoral research, writing, and teaching responsibilities extending the average duration of a scientific Ph.D. as long as six years, it is difficult for women to begin a family and sustain academic work."

More recently, at an Early Stage Researcher Mobility workshop held in February 2004, young scientists, discussing how best to "gender" research institutions, agreed that work-life conflict "is something women in the scientific institution learn to internalize and view as their own problem." One myth of having a scientific career, they said, is that it is "uninterrupted and straightforward." Participants agreed "feminist epistemologies" have shown family is still "invisible" in science, and "work-life balance not traditionally seen as an issue."

In 2002, Katrina Harden Williams had just finished writing her master's thesis with seven other Ph.D. candidates in mathematics at Clark Atlanta University. She had been newly appointed as director of the math laboratory at Spelman College, a position she still holds, when she got married and became a stepmom to two children, with a new baby on the way.

"I had a family, [and] I was teaching four courses in one semester, so I had to learn balance," Williams says.

Williams experience in multitasking tracks with that of many women in academia.

"The junior faculty appointment is an essential turning point in an individual's academic career," said Eleanor Shore, Harvard Medical School's dean of faculty affairs, in the "Women in Science Redux" article. "These women need to teach, research, compete for grants, and publish while raising a family or caring for aging parents."

Addressing Women's Educational Needs

Williams, who graduated from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock in 1995, had taught high school math for five years when she felt she had "reached the maximum in that environment without a master's degree."

So to prepare herself for graduate school, Williams joined a program called EDGE (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education), which is designed to strengthen the ability of women to negotiate the transition from undergraduate to graduate education in the mathematical sciences and ultimately succeed in graduate school.

"EDGE was my launching pad," says Williams. "I had Dr. Bozeman [professor of mathematics at Spelman College and codirector of the EDGE Program] saying, 'Don't give up. You can do this.' "

Dr. Bozeman, who has been married to a math professor for more than three decades and has two adult children — a financial analyst and a chemical engineer turned patent lawyer — says, "Paying attention to the needs of women mentoring is just so critical, because graduate school is hard for everybody. The most we can do is educate people in those positions.... There's so much room for growth."

Speaking about EDGE, Dr. Bozeman says, "We try to build a network to provide support for them, try to give them knowledge about graduate school, about what to expect, and try to see them through and early career development."

Williams says as a grad-student mother, her support system did not just include a cooperative adviser and a husband ready "to take up chores and cook dinner." She also tapped into the network of EDGErs, now based in New York, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia. She has been collaborating with all of them lately as she makes plans to return to grad school in 2006.

"They've provided advise on preparing for the GRE, writing personal statements and finding funding," Williams says. She is looking closely at two local institutions, "because we have a family. And when you talk about uprooting a husband and family, that's taken me in another direction."

Looking forward, Williams says that in five years, she sees herself going through the final part of the dissertation and wrapping it all up.