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The Biology Department at the University of Virginia has taken an integrated approach to help prepare graduate students for future academic careers. One component of the program involves the comprehensive training of teaching assistants as teachers, while the other focuses on improving technical writing and scientific presentation skills. To introduce and foster effective teaching strategies, teaching assistants attend inter- and intra-departmental teaching workshops and prepare and deliver mock lectures prior to the first semester they teach. Teaching assistants are also videotaped during one of their actual laboratory sections. The mock lectures and videotaping rely heavily on self-, peer-, and mentor-evaluation as feedback mechanisms. To develop good writing and presentation skills, students take a semester-long course, covering a variety of topics, such as what makes a good seminar, how to present data and figures, how to search and review the literature, and how to write a scientific paper. As part of the course, students present short research talks to their peers and to the Biology Department, they critique their peers’ presentations as well as speakers at Departmental seminars, and they write drafts of their research findings. This facet of the program also depends on self-, peer-, and mentor-evaluation, which provides a means to objectively determine presentation and writing effectiveness and to suggest areas of improvement. An overview of the program will be presented as well as numerical and anecdotal evidence of the program’s efficacy.