This article presents the combination of three enhanced educational approaches for training future scientists. These methods incorporate skills generally not introduced in the freshman year: student-led blackboard introductions; the writing of scientific papers; and the design, execution, and presentation of an independent lab module. We tested these methods in an interdisciplinary science laboratory course at Princeton University and summarize 2 years of qualitative and quantitative data on the basis of students' evaluations of our approach. In addition to details on our implementation, we show that students mastered all of the requirements and embraced our expectations for greater creativity, independent thinking, and problem solving. The integration of these teaching methods early in their education can help them develop into more successful scientists, and the methods can be broadly applied across the natural sciences. Resources for implementation of our methods are provided.