2000 Graduate Student Commencement Speech
Submitted by freefortermpapers on 06/24/2008 03:00 PM
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2000 Graduate Student Commencement Speech
It is both an honor and a pleasure to speak to you about the student experience here at Rockefeller, because I had the best of times at this university. This year's graduating class has people from most continents of the world, a testimony of this university's commitment to the universality of scientific knowledge. I am proud of having been educated to do research pro bono humani generis, and surely our training here will benefit society not only in the U.S. but also, directly or indirectly, in our home countries.
We lived in this place for many years, during which a deep transformation of our ideas and habits occurred. It is called Ph.D. Now, how was it? Is it possible to retrace for the parents, relatives and friends, who knew us for many years before that transformation had occurred, what was the path of change? Surely this experience wasn't identical for all the students graduating this year, but I believe many aspects of my own recollections apply to all of us, so I'll stick to those.
Year One: This is probably the haziest of the memories I will evoke, not only because of the long time elapsed but also because the arrival is in itself turbulent and mindblasting. Perhaps it could be entitled "The Young Scientist goes to Wonderland".
Imagine for a moment that you're twenty-something and have signed up to play a game called "science". Your objective in the game is to ask questions about nature and answer them in a systematic and skeptical way. The game has many rules, but there are three major ones: first, the questions asked should be completely novel; second, the answers must be reproducible and convincing to other players; third, the method of search should be either based on direct experimentation with reality, or on new combinations of previously accepted answers. All questions are allowed. Perhaps because the number of possible questions is infinite, the game has an informal etiquette: the questions should be as interesting as...
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