Dean's message
How fast could I re-do my PhD thesis?
July 2023
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Early on as a newly-minted PhD, something startling occurred to me. I realized that with the benefit of everything I’d learned in graduate school, I could have gone back and repeated my PhD thesis work quite quickly. My back of the envelope calculation: about five months. That’s what it would have taken to build the testing platforms, do just the exact right experiments, analyze the data, and write it all up. If you subtract out all the time exploring blind alleys, you can express-run to the finish line.
Why do I bring this up now? Because I feel that it is our responsibility to make sure today’s graduate students recognize just how much they are learning and growing when they are exploring the blind alleys of research. We must encourage graduate students to take the inevitable and necessary frustrations in stride – and even to take pleasure in the challenges of the search and research.
Engaging in this search can be daunting for a lone individual, which is one reason that thoughtful mentoring of graduate students is so important. It’s one of the most powerful ways we can transmit our hard-won insights on the nature of engineering and computer science research. In fact, we launched an effort here at the Jacobs School of Engineering to recognize faculty in each of our six academic departments who are stand-out graduate student mentors.
Student-to-student mentorship is another critical activity. I’m proud to share that a chemical engineering graduate student here at the Jacobs School created a program called GradAMP that connects UC San Diego undergraduate students interested in graduate school with graduate students who are in the same area of research specialization. The team that created the program recently published a paper that explains how other schools can replicate it.
At the Jacobs School, we are dedicated to finding new and better ways to help our students ride the ups and downs of the search that is integral to research. We owe it to them – and we owe it to our larger society which benefits from their inspired innovations. Together, we must empower tomorrow’s innovation workforce to embrace the inevitable research setbacks and frustrations.
Read the full July 2023 Jacobs School monthly news email: HTML version / PDF version.
As always, I can be reached at DeanPisano@ucsd.edu.
Sincerely,
Al
Albert ("Al") P. Pisano, Dean
UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering