New Ph.D.s urged to innovate and continue to grow
By Bill Steele
The day before undergraduate commencement, 300 doctoral candidates were formally recognized in a Barton Hall ceremony filled with music, cheering and the constant clicking of cameras.
In her speech to the new Ph.D.s, Barbara Knuth, senior vice provost and dean of the Graduate School, urged flexibility. “Realize that the shelf life of your knowledge is limited,” she said. “Update your knowledge – something for which your Ph.D. experience has made you uniquely qualified. Don’t accept that a thing is done a certain way just because that’s the way it has always been done. Take risks.”
And she urged them to keep in touch. “You will continue to be Cornellians all your life,” she noted. “Take advantage of that kinship.”
About half of the group will go on to academic careers, some at Cornell. Others have chosen careers with such employers as Google, Intel and Goldman Sachs and in the nonprofit sector. Jason Corwin, who received a doctorate in natural resources, will become executive director of the Seneca Media and Communications Center, part of the Seneca Nation. New government Ph.D. Triveni Ghandi will be a research specialist in New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive chamber.
“The Cornell experience has meant challenging myself and those around me to take an ideologically diverse approach to academics and citizen engagement,” said Ghandi. “I've been lucky to be involved with various organizations that allowed me the space to push myself and others beyond our comfort zones in and out of the university.
After an interlude by the Cornell Wind Ensemble, candidates were called to the stage one by one to be “hooded” by Knuth and Charles Van Loan, incoming dean of faculty, signifying their acceptance into the community of advanced scholars.
“When you decide to pursue a Ph.D., it is very difficult because more than 99 percent of the time, your experiments will fail or the grants you apply for will be rejected,” said new doctor of biological and biomedical sciences Sachi Horibata. “The hardest part in the beginning was to face these failures and rejections, one after another, or all at the same time. … And I tell you, the moment you enter Barton Hall for the Ph.D. hooding ceremony, it makes every single minute of hard work worth it.”
The array of fields of study named, from food science to applied physics, or history to computational biology, was a tribute to Cornell’s academic diversity.
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