Symposium on PhD Education in Chemistry
Formal and Informal Graduate Training for a Career in Research Chemistry Edward M. Amen Duke University, Durham, NC 27706
Formal Course Structure Graduate education in chemistry should have as its goal the development of chemists from the level of "students", who are heine taueht to handle and understand the enormous written culture of chemistry, to practicing participants in the acquisition of new knowledee and its transmission to the greater world of science. As prank Westheimer has emphasized recently, the sciences have to be learned sequentially, and there is no way that one can participate in the creation of new chemistry unless one knows where the present limit of currently accepted molecular science lies, i.e., where the cutting edge is. A good undergraduate training should provide the vocabulary and concepts for reading and understanding the literature. Often the first year or so of graduate school requires further development of these fundamentals. As breakthroughs occur, at one point or another along the cutting edge, specialized short courses may be appropriate as an efficient formal means for bringing graduate students, postdocs, and interested faculty up to date.
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590
Journal of Chemical Education
Although some areas, e.g., quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, stereochemistry, etc., are always important and their fundamental concepts rarely change, their applications and cogent examples are in a rapid state of flux, and graduate courses in these and other subiects should corresnondinelv .. , reflect the chaneine ., nature ofchemistry. Accordingly, the course structure of the graduate curriculum should be reexamined freauentl~.Althouch it is efficient to have the same faculty teach the same cours&, for several cycles, departments should avoid the "ownership" of any course by anyone. Infrastructure The PhD is traditionally a research degree, and the principal responsibility that any university has to its chemistry graduate students is to provide a climate in which they learn the process by which important scientific questions are identified and answered. For an experimental science, like chemistry, this requires access to the finest possible infrastructure of laboratories, instrumentation, services, shops, and
library. Without such facilities it is impossible for creative ideas to be tested-there is no opportunity for the complete cycle of the scientific process from hypothesis to experiment to hypothesis to be closed. For this reason the widely recognized deterioration of American university laboratories and instrumentation cannot fail to take its toll from the intellectual development of students and faculty alike. If crucial experiments to settle important problems must be foregone because state-of-the-art instrumentation is not readily available, the whole process of creative and critical thinking is truncated prematurely. Althoueh excellent facilities are necessarv. tbev are bv no means slfficient for good research trainihg. science i s a social~henomenonas well as an intellectual discipline, and a good graduate school should initiate students a; quickly as possible into the great hrotherhood and sisterhood of world chemistry. here-is an enormous qualitative difference between reading an important article by one of the most creative chemists of our time while sitting in the chemistry library of a small liberal arts college and meeting the same oerson when he or she comes to visit vour department to present a colloquium lecture. It is even more exciting as a third- or fourth-vear eraduate student to be able to interact a s a peer with one of &e leaders in your field as you describe vour own doctoral research. A good maduate school should provide opportunities for this type of interaction with the leaders in each student's thesis area during their ueriod of graduate study. Faculty The overall tone and quality of any graduate program in chemistry is set by the faculty. The quality of faculty and the infrastructure should be the most important factors by which students choose their graduate school. However, most of the day-to-day instruction of graduate students is done by other graduate students and postdocs. In a good graduate school incoming graduate students learn from good graduate students. In a poor graduate school they learn from poor graduate students. The educational results are obvious. The faculty (and the administration that does or does not support it) largely determines the nature and the quality of infrastructure and are the principal attraction for high-qualitv eraduate students. The established facultv make the and the t k G h l e decisions concerning the course recruitment of new facultv. Clearlv. an outstandine chemistry department must have a fatuity of active, practicing scientists who are responsible members of the greater academic community. For better or for worse university professors are role models for their students and are also piblic figures. Most of us know through of faculties composed of dedicated . experience . and creative scientists who are expert teachers who enjoy their work, their students, and their colleagues. Sadly enough, there are others that are unhappy, petty, factionridden groups of malcontents who have an embittered attitude toward their institutions and their work and who exploit their students. I t would be hard to exaggerate the influence of either type of graduate faculty on their students.
structure
Learnlng To Be Craatlve and Crltlcal In the Research Group The professor-research director has the responsibility to be a mentor, fellow scientist, and friend to his or her students on a day-to-day basis. From the master-apprentice relationship within a research group students must learn a number of crucial intellectual and professional skills. With their mentor they must learn what it means to do creative work. I t has been said that the psychology of creative activity oscillates between two extremes: hysteria and compulsion. Certainly the hysterical phase of conceiving a new idea or concept must come from the deep wells of imagination, but once that is done the development of the idea and its testing require the utmost care, precision, and self-criticism.
The immediate moment of a creative act is a highly subjective one but may not get past the "hysterical level" unless followed by a careful, tough-minded, critical examination. Within their research eroum . and in department seminars. students must learn to compare, evaluate, and criticize scientific work. They must learn to appreciate hierachies of importance of ideas, of productive discussion, and establish criteria for evaluating the quality of their own work and of others. Great teachers of the research process (e.g., G. N. Lewis, P. D. Bartlett, G. Stork) have had a special flair for demonstrating the creative act and how to apply appropriate standards of criticism. The departmental seminar-colloquium program should provide occasions for learning to discriminate intellectual contributions that are of deep and lasting value from those that are merely fads or new names for old ideas. However, the research group should be the ~ r i m a r vplace where communication slkillsare taught to &dents,-&st in the presentation of interesting iournal articles by new members, and the presentation o
