Parker's Polemic - Instructor Commentary to all Teams
Welcome to Creating Life Science Products (BTC1850H). This is the inaugural year of this course and is an experiment in cross-functional training for graduate students. This course is discussion oriented and team based. There will be very little by way of structured lecture. Team members will be coached to work together on their commercialization problem.
It is not the intent of the course to make specialists in given area (e.g. engineering) specialists in another area (e.g. business or regulatory affairs). Specialists have to learn to leverage the skills of other people in their team.
The inspiration for this course comes from a series of projects I have supervised over the past few years that have received attention from industry and the ministry of health. However, students who had the same background drove all those projects. In this course, we will see if we can reach a new level of success by creating some potential start-ups, driven this time by student teams with diverse backgrounds spanning from business, artistic design, clinical, regulatory and so on.
This is an exciting and challenging time for graduate students. You will have to start thinking about your careers beyond graduate school. Some of you may enter academia, but with positions limited, many of you by choice or necessity, will consider industry for your future career trajectory. This course, will hopefully help enable that journey by providing some hands on training in a cross functional environment and in commercialization challenges.
The workload will be significant, but spread over 2 terms it should be manageable. Each team member will have the chance to provide a confidential evaluation of his or her other team members, in terms of support and commitment to the team project. This feedback will help inform the participation mark for this course.
I can be contacted for team meetings outside of class time - please do not hesitate to do so. I wish you all the best in this undertaking, as I will work with each team closely to help maximize your success.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jayson Parker
Medical Biotechnology Analyst
University of Toronto