Graduate Education in the Chemical Sciences Issues for the 21st Century: Report of a Workshop (2000) / Chapter Skim
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3 Graduate Education in Chemistry: A Personal Perspective on Where It Has Been and Where It Might Go
3 Graduate Education in Chemistry: A Personal Perspective on Where It Has Been and Where It Might Go
Pages 27-36
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From page 27... ...
The subject of atomic and molecular collisions evolved primarily in physics but, with the work of Sheldon Datz and Ellison Taylor and of Philip B Moon and associates in the mid-1950s, physics and chemistry developed 27
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From page 28... ...
But there are fundamental, important, and potentially productive questions standing open in this field. Can anyone recast the formally exact density functional theory developed by Pierre Hohenberg and Walter Kohn, starting with first principles, in a form whose lowest approximation is the ubiquitous (but still only ad hoc)
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From page 29... ...
Unfortunately, those less successful examples, the cases people are reluctant to discuss, are the cases from which we would learn the most. If we examine how institutional structures affect the scientific enterprise, we must be prepared to go about it objectively, i.e., we must look for both the positive and negative consequences for science and education of institutionalized supporting structures with specific goals.
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From page 30... ...
The journeyman stage of a scientific career may be unclearly defined if the person goes immediately to an industrial or government job, but even there the newly hired scientist is likely to go through a sort of training period or interval under some supervision. If the fresh Ph.D.
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From page 31... ...
The former tend to operate in about the same manner as academic groups that have no such collaborations, following the same sociology and rules of behavior as university researchers have for many years. The latter tend toward industry-like behavior, meaning that proprietary concerns play a larger role in the one-on-one collaborations than they do in relations involving consortia.
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From page 32... ...
We have to worry about that motivation. John Kenneth Galbraith, a well-known Democrat, once defined modern Republicanism as an attempt to give a philosophical justification to selfishness.
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From page 33... ...
She pursued that research proposal in her independent research career, got tenure, and is now one of the major figures in an Ivy League university as a result of that proposal. This is not an unusual situation.
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From page 34... ...
However, for a number of other schools, extending the time line is caused, in part, by students filling deficiencies in basic chemical knowledge. Clearly, it is not just an issue of research.
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From page 35... ...
We also heard today a concern about how giving funding to students can affect faculty negatively, especially with regard to tenure. Ed Wasserman says that he finds faculty often resist sending their graduate students to some of the softer skills courses and seminars.
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From page 36... ...
I think that the goal of graduate education in the chemical sciences has to be to give students a transcendent sense of power when it comes to dealing with matters of a chemical nature.
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