Speaking as a former undergraduate and then graduate research scientist at a top 3 biomedical engineering program in the United States, I can tell you, students spend an unseemly amount of time on figures. The professor of one of the labs I worked in said an aesthetic figure can be the difference between getting into Nature or not. His collaborator on that paper happened to be a well-known professor who had papers published in Nature a handful of times. That was, apparently, one of his secrets.
aprct|11 months ago