At the end of the first year, a three people-committee will be formed for each student. The chair of the committee will assign a paper in one of the four main areas of neurobiology: development, cellular and molecular, behavior or systems. The student will have about ten days to write up to six pages of comments and critique of the assigned paper. These will include technical and conceptual aspects of the paper, its broad impact in the field, the strengths and limits of the experiments, the validity of the conclusions and the further questions the work leads up to. About ten days after submitting the text, the student will undergo an oral exam in which the members of his/her exam committee will test, in detail, the understanding by the student of all components of the assigned paper. The two parts of the exam will fulfill the graduate school requirement for a written and an oral exam.