hen I look back on a certain incident in my graduate school career, I am amazed by my own behavior. Yet this incident, with its sequel, captures the essentials of graduate education.

When I entered the University of California at Berkeley in the summer of 1955, I chose as my adviser W.F. Giauque. Giauque was a chemist with very high personal standards, a very skeptical, very formal man. Only his wife called him anything but "W.F." His graduate students called him "Professor," while he called us by our last names. Although not of the Old World at all, he had those habits, one of which was that he liked to argue.

We had one run-in, the incident which still amazes me. For an experiment to measure the magnetic susceptibility of a certain salt, I had designed a way to wind wire noninductively onto an egg-shaped glass vessel. Professor Giauque considered my method, if not impossible, at least unpromising, and he quickly ruled it out. I would have none of this. I was, in retrospect, very rude. "IÕm not going to continue this argument," I declared. "You say I canÕt do it and I say I can and IÕm going to get up and go do it." And I walked out, all but slamming his door behind me. When my technique worked, he adopted it without complaint. Several years later, when I was being considered for a faculty position at Berkeley, there was some discussion as to the wisdom of hiring a Berkeley Ph.D. Then Professor Giauque stepped forward and related this incident as an example of my independent thinking. I got the job.

Because of my positive experiences with Giauque, I would have no use for a university in which faculty have "stables" of graduate students and treat them as workers whose purpose is to make the professors famous. While all 10,677 Penn State graduate students perform research as part of the requirements for their degrees, and while nearly every project in the universityÕs $275-million research budget employs graduate students, the students are not subservient to the research program. Rather, the reverse is true: The first and most important purpose of the University is to educate students, to turn out creative and productive members of society.

But the issue comes up in each studentÕs career: How much free rein should a student be given? Again and again a professor must find a balance. In my career at Berkeley, I have some 80 graduate students (unlike Giauque, they called me "Dave"). I let some of them do things "wrong" for months before pointing out their mistakes to them. I also had graduate students whose instincts were better than mine. What I thought was wrong they eventually proved to be right. I would have been mistaken to have tried to turn these students around, for the lesson I learned from Giauque was: Think for yourself. Have a plan.

You make one important transition in graduate school: from a passive learning mode to an active one. As an undergraduate, you only have to exceed a certain threshold - - say, 92 percent - - to be judged excellent. As a graduate student, you have to get it all right, because youÕre going to publish it. To do that, you must engage you creativity. As an undergraduate you may wonder if youÕll ever come up with an original research project. Once your creativity is engaged, the ideas flow freely: You have to throw out 99 ideas in order to have time for the 100^th one. It them becomes a question of organization, of having a plan and pursuing it.

From the pain of having gone through this transition myself, I learned to respect it in students and to encourage it. As the new dean of the Graduate School at Penn State, I hope to help make it as smooth a transition as possible. Since March, I and my colleagues have begun to formulate major new initiatives to enhance graduate education at Penn State. I intend to increase the number of fellowships, to recruit more of the best graduate students from America and abroad, to continue to expand the research program (now ranked ninth among American universities), and to strengthen ties with graduate alumni.

This issue of Research/Penn State presents students who participated in the 1992 Graduate Research Exhibition. Sending this magazine to 15,000 new readers, including Penn StateÕs doctoral alumni, is part of my plan.