芝加哥学术生涯规划-第二章..docVIP

芝加哥学术生涯规划 原文 Entering Graduate School A chapter from The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure by John A. Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine Gold  What is graduate school really all about? John Goldsmith: I would say that the most important fact to bear in mind is that, in general, the purposes of graduate school and of undergraduate studies could hardly be more different. A college education—in the United States, at least—is aimed at providing a general education, a liberal education, even if the choice of a major subject does allow some degree of specialization. In contrast, graduate education is aimed at creating a professional. When I use the term professional, of course, I am not using it in the most familiar way. The term is generally used in relation to disciplines such as law, medicine, and business. The schools in these disciplines provide specific training along what are generally well established lines, bringing the student to the point where she may, in most of the cases, pass a standardized examination, such as the bar exam or the medical boards. The professional schools do not require students to write a dissertation or engage in individual research efforts—those hallmarks of graduate education in a research university. Yet it is still true that graduate education is aimed at forming a particular type of professional: a professional researcher. There are some important things to say about this. The most significant of all is that this kind of intellectual formation has relatively little to do with passing on specific information. Oh, it is true that all educators make similar claims: they are not teaching specific things, but rather how to learn; still, this is nowhere as clear as in graduate school. Alas, the graduate research environment is not structured so as to be the training ground for the most extraordinary minds either. There are too few of them to justify (or help s