Graduate Education in the Chemical Sciences Issues for the 21st Century: Report of a Workshop (2000) / Chapter Skim
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7 Keeping an Eye to the Future in Designing Graduate Programs
7 Keeping an Eye to the Future in Designing Graduate Programs
Pages 91-105
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From page 91... ...
Several years ago, for example, COSEPUP produced a report that addressed the need for reshaping graduate education for scientists and engineers. A concurrent report first suggested that the United States must be among the leaders, although not necessarily the undisputed world leader, in every major field of science.2 These reports emphasized not only the importance of maintaining leadership across core disciplines, but also the need to be in a position to address interdisciplinary challenges across the entire range of human need.
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From page 92... ...
A recent publication by CUSE emphasizes the need for including the same techniques used so profitably in graduate education in the experiential learning of our best undergraduate programs.3 The COSEPUP report also emphasized the importance of producing well-educated Americans, people who understand the goals and achievements of science and the scientific reasoning that leads to those results. We need people who can conduct sophisticated scientific investigations, of course, but we also need those who are active in nonscientific roles in our society, especially those working in public policy, in the law, or as leaders in their communities to appreciate science.
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From page 93... ...
A special interest group resists change; it seeks additional resources as a cure for its own internal stresses; it attempts to demonstrate that members of its group deserve special treatment; it assigns its own values primacy in influencing decisions and allocations; and it claims moral superiority and privilege for its own activities. Often when we think about lobbyists, we think about big oil, big tobacco, big whatever.
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From page 94... ...
This fellowship program in many ways has faced the same challenges in achieving a diverse student population as do university undergraduate admissions procedures that emphasize high school GPA and SAT scores. It is interesting, as an aside, to observe that there is a far better correlation between the successful completion of an undergraduate degree in science and a high school curriculum containing at least two years of a foreign language and four years of mathematics, than there is with SAT scores.
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From page 95... ...
Fellowships may also affect the quality of undergraduate instruction, by removing the best and brightest from the ranks of teaching assistants, thus depriving undergraduate students of access to the purportedly best graduate students, and denying these strong graduate students the opportunity to experience teaching at an early stage of their careers. If many, or most, domestic students were supported as fellows, a larger fraction of the teaching assistants would likely be foreign students.
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From page 96... ...
Instead, the NSB report encouraged experimentation: traineeships for programs that encourage breadth and focus on interdisciplinary research; fellowships for some professional master's degrees; expansion of the fields for which fellowships are awarded to include nontraditional disciplines and emerging cross-disciplinary areas, perhaps supporting students who have advanced to candidacy in one discipline and wish to use their disciplinary skills to solve a scientific problem in another discipline; and fellowships that support scholarly work undertaken in industry. ENCOURAGING UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS The NSB report also suggested that demographic diversity, measured by full participation of all groups, should be one of the goals of any expanded fellowship program.
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From page 97... ...
It is a double magnet school to be run on our Centennial Campus (our collaborative research area) in collaboration with the local public schools.
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From page 98... ...
The significant question is whether the Internet can provide the integrated education that is characteristic of our best colleges and universities, or whether it best conveys narrowly defined training skills for specific immediate career needs. Lest we all assume that within the next decade parents will routinely send their sons and daughters to their rooms for four years to be educated by distance learning, we should remember that Thomas Edison claimed in 1877 that the motion picture was "destined to revolutionize our educational system" and he expected that within a few years it would "supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks." However, if we accept Internet suppliers as potential competitors for supplying at least some of the nation's needs for advanced education, we will have to state clearly what universities can uniquely provide.
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From page 99... ...
Clearly, the implicit assumption that such research will be funded by the federal government plays some role. In addition, some have suggested that because the results of basic research are freely published and shared broadly, rewards cannot be captured by the investor hence, the recent evolution of more private-sector consortia to provide sponsorship and collaboration for basic research questions that underlie broad industrially relevant topics.
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From page 100... ...
These companies range from start-ups located in our business incubator, with two or three employees, to major international corporations such as Lucent Technologies, which has chosen to move its optical networking group with 500 graduate-level employees onto our campus. Accompanying these decisions has been an increased royalty stream that has doubled over just 2 years and an increased number of research contracts with other industrial firms anxious to tap the academic expertise of our faculty.
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From page 101... ...
We are delighted to have a chance to work with the public schools to do just that on our Centennial Campus, which is nonresidential. In North Carolina, a superb residential magnet school, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, has been a stunning success, particularly in recruiting African-American students to science and engineering.
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From page 102... ...
We have completed a capital campaign of $115 million over a target of $80 million, which is to be used for merit-based scholarships, and are seeking through new legislation about half a million dollars for support of undergraduate research. We have stimulated interdisciplinary activities by providing seed support and space, about 200,000 square feet for the six initiatives, for faculty from several colleges to work together on the Centennial Campus.
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From page 103... ...
There are several approaches we can take as a society. One is to work with the states to adopt reasonable alternate certification procedures in which the pedagogical component can be shrunk to a more reasonable level, perhaps allowing for structured supervised teaching as a substitute for education courses.
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From page 104... ...
And we have, as well, through some of our venture capital funds, strong connections with some of the private institutions like the ones you are mentioning. We have, for example, a start-up company in the incubator on our Centennial Campus, which is a joint partnership between NC State and Wake Forest University.
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From page 105... ...
Marye Anne Fox: Absolutely. Craig Merlic, University of California, Los Angeles: You mentioned the need for about 80,000 teachers in North Carolina.
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