The purposes of Cognitive Brown Bag are: 1) to expose program members (students and faculty) to colleagues’ research, 2) to develop and improve presentation and discussion skills, 3) to expose students to methods not covered in modules, and 4) to provide opportunities for professional development.

Exposure to colleagues’ research:
- Each student is required to give one presentation in an academic year. This presentation must be a polished presentation about research at any stage of the process (i.e., introduction and research questions, with methods, with preliminary results, or ‘traditional’ talk).
- Each semester one outside faculty will present his or her research.

Develop and improve presentations and discussion skills:
- Immediately following a brown bag presentation, the student presenter will receive feedback in a short, informal meeting with a member of his or her mentoring committee and the brown bag coordinator.
- In addition, every student will be assigned to act as discussant for a presentation. As discussant, the student will review the presenter's materials in advance of the presentation and prepare several questions to encourage discussion.

Exposure to methods
- At least one talk will be given each semester covering a method that is not covered in one of the modules.

Professional Development
- At least one talk will be given each semester with a focus on professional development.

Attendance Requirement
- Attendance is required and will be checked. Students will be allowed to skip two talks each semester. Methods, professional development, and invited speaker talks are all mandatory and should not be skipped.

Improving the quality of the presentations
In a survey of participating students, most students strongly agreed that presentation skills are important (average rating of 4.52 out of 5), but this agreement dropped in regards to whether one’s own presentation skills need to improve (average rating of 3.76 out of 5). One of the goals of Brown Bag is for students to practice giving presentations to build their presentation skills. There were several areas in which the faculty think the majority of the students can improve (i.e., faculty were asked to provide what percentage of last years talks included the following features).