Graduate student

“ The most precious thing of all, however, if you have made the most of your chance, is the uplift, encouragement, inspiration, which you have absorbed from your teachers, from your associations; this is the embodiment of the college spirit, the spirit of your alma mater; it is that which should make you reach up as well as on, which should make you aspire instead of grovel—look up, instead of down.
The graduate should regard his education as a sacred trust. ”

“ What the old man has to say to the young man, the teacher to the pupil, the father to the son, at the moment when the gates of the great world are flung open to the college graduate, has undergone but little modification in a thousand years, and has become very well known to all collegians long before they take their degree. ”

“ Three elements compose the graduate college. Foremost is a body of first rate professors, to be added to others now in the faculty, interesting men, scholars of high power, eminent in their subjects, and able to waken young men. ”

“ In the dogma expressed here it seems to me you treat the university graduate, who has had four years' earnest study, as if he were in kilts, and the girl in short skirts. Those men and women have wrested from the college tradition the right to say what they are going to do, in their junior, if not their sophomore year, and to come out after their graduation from economical and sociological courses and to be presented to the curriculum you have, is little short of absurd. ”

“ In the first place, it would seem that to stimulate study, and to increase the gelehrtes Publikum, the class of highly educated men in our country, is the only positive good, and consequently the sole direct end at which our graduate schools, with their diploma-giving powers, should aim. ”

“ We would by no means interfere with this graduation in the schools; but, in addition to this, there ought, we think, to be some goal of more elevated attainment, which might excite the attention and emulation of those whose opportunities admit of their being well educated. Let it bear the title of Bachelor of Arts, or Master of Arts, or graduate, and, if a definite meaning be affixed to it by the college authorities, it cannot fail to be as well understood as the unmeaning terms, sophomore, freshman, senior-wrangler, &c. ”

“ Once upon a time a certain old graduate found himself in the midst of a beautiful college campus. On all sides he beheld old beloved scenes and well-remembered landmarks; but also he discovered new haunts, new places, unfamiliar and somehow unwelcome to him. And about him, as he stood there gazing, came and went many of the same recognizable types of lovable undergraduate humanity; and yet here in the crowd strolled one sort and over there across the way stood another sort that seemed strange and unexpected. ”

“ With the increasing specialization of the higher education, the attitude of the graduate is likely to be increasingly humble; and a college man will not be led to feel that he is expected to know everything about everything. ”

“ And now the undergraduate will emphasize study. But a sharp line must be drawn between study that looks forward merely to the A.B. degree as the end of schooling and the beginning of business, and study that is a part of professional training, that looks forward to some professional degree at Commencement or to matriculation in a graduate school. ”

“ The greatest thing any friend or teacher, either in school or college, can do for a student is to furnish him with a personal ideal. The college professors who transformed me through my acquaintance with them—ah, they were few, and I am sure I did not have a dozen conversations with them outside their class rooms—gave me, each in his different way, an ideal of character, of conduct, of the scholar, the leader, of which they and I were totally unconscious at the time. ”

“ It’s hardly a college since it has no student body nor faculty. Rather, both are one at the haven. Anyone admitted is a scholar or potential scholar anxious to devote himself to learning. I mean for its own sake. ”

“ The Graduate School was established; and of all the influences which have contributed to raise the standard of scholarship at Harvard, both for teachers and taught, that graduate work seems to me the greatest. Every professor now must be the master of a field of knowledge, and not of a few paths running through it.
But the ideal teacher will accumulate wealth, not merely for his pupils’ sake, but for his own. ”

“ A college graduate is often surprised years after he leaves the college to find that about all he has to show for his education is his diploma. The power, the efficiency which he gained there has been lost because he has not been using them. ”

“ The following are opinions that represent the majority or appear important as individual views: (1) The high-school graduate, when entering college, should possess a mind educated by methods that create interest and make power to think and generalize—power to do original work. (2) He should have an acquaintance with each field of knowledge, and should show a symmetrical development of his mental activities. (3) As tending to produce greater interest, knowledge, and power, he should have been trained in only a limited number of subjects in each field ”

“ The spread of varied types of secondary schools, the increasing specialisation of higher education, and the experience which all the universities of the world have accumulated as to the possibility of testing the genuineness and intellectual quality of 'post graduate' theses have had little or no effect. ”

“ Every student under the degree of master of arts was required to have a tutor, thus regularizing the position of fellow-commoners, pensioners, sizars, and subsizars as members of the College, and bringing them under the same rule as scholars. ”

“ What do I mean by graduates? Why, that they have made love to her, and would be entitled to her diploma, if she gave a parchment to each one of them who had had the courage to face the inevitable. About the Counsellor I am, as I have said, in doubt. Who wrote that “I Like You and I Love You,” which we found in the sugar-bowl the other day? Was it a graduate who had felt the “icy dagger,” or only a candidate for graduation who was afraid of it? ”

“ The whole question in every high school and every preparatory school is whether the training will accredit one to certain colleges and universities. So the traditional high school graduate is not prepared for life; he is prepared for college or the university. He goes on to the university. There he finds that he is being prepared chiefly for four or five learned professions—the law, the ministry, medicine, engineering, and teaching. In the beginning, the university was supposed to train a man, not for work, but for leisure. The very word scholar means a man of leisure. ”

“ In a large university, the demand upon the teacher for more work than he should rightfully undertake, the ever-increasing interest of the student in college affairs, with many other influences, are constantly presented as difficulties in the way of the teacher’s close relationship with the student. ”

“ Every graduate had an equal right of teaching publicly in the University the subjects competent to his faculty and to the rank of his degree; nay, every graduate incurred the obligation of teaching publicly, for a certain period, the subjects of his faculty—for such was the condition involved in the grant of the degree itself. The bachelor, or imperfect graduate, partly as an exercise towards the higher honour, and useful to himself, partly as a performance due for the degree obtained, and of advantage to others, was bound to read under a master or doctor in his faculty a course of lectures ”

“ If a college undergraduate is ready to be honest with himself, he must say, "If I am consistent with mediocre work in college, it is likely that the men in my class who graduate with honor will have three times my chances of success in the Law School, and the men who graduate in my class with highest honor will have nearly ten times my chances of success." ”

“ It is not strange, therefore, that many of the professors pursued reputable occupations during their odd hours or that they took students to board. We hear to-day of frequent illustrations of the pursuit of knowledge under difficulty, but certainly during the ages to which I have referred the ardent student, were he undergraduate or professor, put up with an amount of hardship, meagre fare, and trouble of all kinds which would stagger most of the young men of to-day. ”

“ Now, for the first time, when we have to accompany the Student from the Academy into Life, we must call to mind that the studies and character of the Progressive Scholar are not necessarily completed with his residence at the University ”

“ While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars, it is the undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university management. ”

“ In the university, and to some extent in the graduate courses of the college leading to the master's degree, the subjects and methods of teaching may well be very different. Studies in comparative literature, studies of literary origins, the investigation of perplexed or controverted questions in the life or work of an author, the study and elucidation of the work of an unknown or little-known writer—all these and many other similar matters may very properly be the subjects of specialized graduate study. But they will rarely be found of most profit to undergraduate classes. ”

“ A man must live with himself. He must be a good companion for himself. A college graduate, whatever his specialty, should be able to spend an evening apart from the crowd. The theater, the automobile, the lobster-palace, were never intended to be the chief end of collegiate education. A college course should give the undergraduate tastes, temperament, and habits of reading. A graduate who studies to be a specialist in any line needs also the education which will give him depth, background, and the historical [63] significance of civilization and life in general. ”

“ The college, moreover, should start the graduate interest in philanthropic and serious enterprises which in themselves furnish suitable as well as pleasing relaxation to hundreds of American university men. ”

“ The growth of summer schools at universities and the frequent transfer of normal-school graduates to college and graduate courses show with clearness the desire of teachers to enjoy the advantages of all kinds of higher education. ”

“ Only when the professional schools are real graduate departments, requiring under-graduate training for admission, is the university doing its work properly. This was the rule in the past--hence the precious lessons for the present in the story of these old-time universities. ”

“ All of the preceding discussion applies only to undergraduate work. Only comparatively few engineering students take graduate work. A few institutions have enough such students to justify, for administrative reasons, the organization of classes in graduate work, but usually such classes are conducted upon principles quite different from those employed for undergraduates. ”

“ One reason, as I said, for the gulf between the majority and the select few to be educated is, that the college does not seldom disappoint the reasonable expectation concerning it. The graduate of the carpenter's shop knows how to use his tools—or used to in days before superficial training in trades became the rule. Does the college graduate know how to use his tools? Or has he to set about fitting himself for some employment, and gaining that culture, that training of himself, that utilization of his information which will make him necessary in the world? ”

“ It will so improve the first two years of undergraduate work that students will be much better prepared to take up courses leading to professional and graduate pursuits in their junior year. And this is what many educators, together with the National Association of State Universities, wish to bring about. ”

“ D. degree as entrance to professional life, necessitating several years of post-graduate study, often forces parents to take up their share in the increased burden. Then, however, few were agreed as to the advisability of prolonging an unpractical life devoted to study beyond what seemed the maximum limit of unproductive preparation for life—the day of graduation at college. ”

“ It is you, young graduates, and you, still younger, who are to be graduates hereafter, that I would most of all desire to have thoroughly saturated with all the beneficial influence that a University can impart to its children. ”

“ How helpful to a student is such a friendly association with some professor who commands his confidence, respect and regard, and who is interested in his college work, not for itself alone, but quite as much because of its bearing on his future life’s usefulness. ”

“ We remember that education is generally sought for by the student as a means of rising in a profession, and that if his profession is to be science, he must make use of the five years of his collegiate course for this purpose, — that spring season of his mind when the faculties are most elastic and the memory most receptive—a season to be enjoyed while it lasts, for to him it will never return! ”