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Comprehensive professional development is rarely offered to graduate students, yet would assist students to obtain employment and prosper in their careers. Our objective was to design a course framework to provide professional development training to graduate students that is comprehensive, minimizes faculty workload, and provides enculturation into a single scientific discipline. The course framework is participant‐run with faculty facilitation. A pilot course was offered at the University of Maryland College Park in 2004 with eight participants using discussion, writing, reading, and peer‐to‐peer review methods. The course covered a breadth of professional development subjects with technical writing, manuscript writing, and job search prioritized. Mean participant rating of the overall course was 4.8 (out of 5). Faculty workload was successfully minimized. Discipline enculturation was included in most discussions and readings. We propose that education in a subject be divided into foundation‐level and competency‐level training. Foundation‐level training includes fundamental knowledge and resource awareness. Competency‐level training includes the abilities to perform at a level sufficient to obtain and maintain employment and to accurately evaluate the performance of others. Course weaknesses included poor coverage of some fundamentals, some missed deadlines, and variable quality of reviews. These weaknesses may be resolved with improved discipline‐specific materials, deadline‐based grading, review rubrics, quantitative knowledge assessment and evaluation, and external review for competency‐level training. This course framework has potential to offer comprehensive foundation‐level training and selective competency‐level training to graduate students.

Drainage ditch soils mediate nutrient and sediment cycling and transport from ditch‐drained agroecosystems. Ditch management may influence the hydromorphology and mineralogy of ditch soils, which in turn may affect their capacity to serve as a nutrient sink. We assessed the effects of hydrologic and soil treatments on ditch soil morphology using mesocosms (15‐cm inner diameter, 20–40 cm length) gathered before and after a dredging event. Hydrologic treatments were continuous saturation, continuous field capacity, and an alternating treatment. Soil treatments were organic soil addition, soil removal, and a control. Mesocosms that experienced continuous saturation developed yellower soil matrices and redox concentrations than other experimental mesocosms; this yellowing was interpreted as a loss of paracrystalline ferrihydrite and a retention of goethite. Iron‐monosulfides and depletions were more abundant in mesocosms experiencing greater degrees of saturation. The loss of ferrihydrite may indicate reduced P sorption capacity. Colluvial or alluvial materials observed in post‐dredged mesocosms indicate the potential of high sediment loss in periods following dredging before vegetation and soil structure establishment.

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