The View from the Other Side

Commencement Address: May 2^nd 2003

Given by Lanny D. Schmidt
Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis MN 55455

I begin by going back 30 some years when I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in Physical Chemistry. The ceremony took place In Rockefeller Chapel, a magnificent gothic building with high ceilings and stained glass windows. We all walked majestically down the aisle wearing our black bathrobes while the pipe organ played Pomp and Circumstance.

My parents drove down from our hometown with some aunts and uncles. While they were impressed and proud, it was clear that they didn’t have a clue what was going on. None of them had ever been to college, and, while they were proud that their son had received this distinction, they had no idea what it meant and what it was for. They would try to ask "What was your thesis title?" "The Adsorption of Potassium on Tungsten". Pause. "What was it about?" "I used field emission microscopy to examine ionic adsorbates on metals". Then we went outside to take pictures on the lawn.

Then when I began to teach at the University of Minnesota, I would go home to visit and they wanted to know what I did. Teach. "What do you teach?" Thermodynamics. "How many classes?" One or two. "How many hours a week? Five. You could see the question formulated: "I wonder what he does from Tuesday through Friday?" There was no point trying to explain it.
I'm sure many if you here have been in the same situation, trying to connect and failing totally. This is not because anyone is more or less intelligent, but just that we cannot describe our situations. I want to consider some of the reasons for this disconnect.

We all understand the undergraduate program fairly well. Take certain courses on certain subjects at a certain level and get a C or above, and we give you a Bachelor's degree. The MS and PhD are very different. When a student comes into my office to see if he wants to work for me, I give a highly fictionalized account of what he or she might to for a thesis, trying to make it sound interesting but something that can be finished in a month easily. Anything realistic would scare the student off immediately. Entering students simply do not understand what an advanced degree is all about, and I do not want to or cannot tell them.

I have had a fairly successful career at Minnesota, with lots of publications and grant funding. However, my greatest achievement by far is the 80 PhD and MS students I have trained and supervised. It is absolutely marvelous to see them do some really creative work here and then go on to successful careers in industry or academia.

I have secret to success as a professor: (1) only choose graduate students that are smarter than you, and (2) never let them know that they are smarter until it is too late for them to do anything about it.

Now all of you graduates here have listened to some really clinker ideas from your advisor. You could never say that the idea was dumb, because your advisor had to sign the form saying you could be here for your degree. Instead you wasted days to months proving him wrong. Hopefully he did have some useful suggestions, and fine tuned your ideas to make a creative thesis. However, no theses look at all like the advisor sketches out initially, and some very different ideas finally became the heart of your thesis.

What is this thing we call a thesis that is of sufficient quality to justify granting a MS or PhD? I can't say. You took a few courses, but they weren't at all the heart of the matter. You read a lot of books and journal articles, but this was just background. A thesis must be "scholarly" and "creative". What to these words mean? One person's scholarship is another persons' boredom and one person's creativity is another person's triviality. Presumably what you wrote had sufficient amounts of these ingredients that 3 to 6 of our faculty signed a piece of paper giving you a degree. "Professional" and "geek" have definite similarities.

The subject of graduate work is research, again a difficult term to define. My current research is related to fuel cells and the Hydrogen Economy, but we look at only a small part of the problems related to fuel cells.

Does the graduate enterprise make any sense if we can't even define it? Pragmatically yes, because average salaries rise 50% with the BS degree, another 20% with a MS and 40% with a PhD, so there is some merit. With today's lousy job market, these financial incentives perhaps don't mean much, but times will get better. You also probably had some fun along with the frustration along the way, and that is another reason for pursuing this degree.

The definition of research is that we do not know the answers beforehand, and we do not know if our ideas will work until we try, fail, and try again. If we knew the answers, it would not be research, and along the way we need to demonstrate some scholarship and creativity in the way we handle the issues and raise some new issues.

There is frequent discussion of the contradictions between research and teaching at the University. I will state emphatically that I believe there is no contradiction if these are properly defined. We teach undergraduates the basic ideas of a subject primarily through courses, and we allow our students to graduate if they are "competent". In the graduate program we try to go beyond that goal, so that they become professionals who are capable of pushing the frontiers of knowledge beyond those in textbooks. I and all of my colleagues take equal pride in teaching freshmen and supervising PhD theses. The tasks are quite different, but they are equally rewarding.

Another secret of success in the university is that we are no better than the students we attract and the careers that our graduates generate. We need good faculty and buildings just to assure that we will attract the best students. Minnesota ranks in the top 15 in the nation in research (again hard to quantify), and this is exclusively due to the students like you that choose to come here and the successful careers that you will soon have.

In summary, there are three different audiences here: graduates, family and friends, and faculty and administration. We have different backgrounds and we do not understand each other very well. However, we desperately need each other. You graduates desperately needed your family and friends moral support when you were discouraged about your thesis progress and your advisor's stupidity. Perhaps some financial support also. The faculty could go nowhere if it weren't for the excellent students we attract.

Even if we don't always understand each other, we clearly need and are grateful for each other.
I close by asking you to look forward 30 years when you graduates will be sitting in the back at a ceremony like this. You will ask the graduate what she did for her thesis and she will fumble just like you are doing today. You won't understand her but you will be proud and you will both need each other. Then you will all go out on the lawn and take pictures.