 Hi everybody and welcome to the University of Michigan. Like you, I'm brand new to the university. I've been here all of seven weeks, but I was attracted here probably for some of the same reasons. It's the really unmatched academic excellence of the University of Michigan, the JUMI here, and I can tell you for my life as an academician, graduate students are the heart and soul of a research university. So I'm really thrilled to have one of my first set of public comments being welcoming my first cohort of graduate students, masters and PhD students here to the university. As the provost said, I was once, and now it seems long ago, a graduate student as well. I did my own PhD training at Johns Hopkins in biochemistry as part of a combined MD-PhD program back in the early 1980s. I think back of that is a really transformative period in my life. It's completely different being a graduate student as compared to an undergraduate. You go from being a passive learner to being a contributor to the discipline that you're studying in. You're here to create new knowledge and to make novel discoveries. You're stepping into a very unpredictable world. It used to be, if you took the right courses, got the right grades, you would graduate. Now you have to continue taking classes to become masters of your field and prove what you've learned through qualifying examination, but then the real fun begins. You have to create knowledge. You have to discover. You have to produce creative works. It's a scary thing, but there really isn't as clear a fixed end point as a graduate student as there was when you were undergraduates. Actually, when I would speak at graduation exercises for doctoral back at Berkeley, I would tell them that I heard in the past that graduate school is where you gradually discover you don't want to be a student anymore. But I want to urge you to be incredibly ambitious. This is a phase in your life where you can actually be selfish. Everyone expects you to work really hard, as the provost said, and disappear to an extent into your work. It's a very privileged stage in your career. You've got responsibilities, but it's not quite as complicated as it's going to be in the future. You're not going to get rich as a graduate student, obviously, but if you think about it, the doctoral students here are on fellowship. We're not charging you tuition. You're here to learn and to become our successors as academic missions and as academic leaders, and you get a living stipend to boot. So it's really a spectacularly good deal, a great period of time in your professional development. My graduate school mentor, Don Brown, gave me some invaluable advice or perspective. I was always busy in the lab all the time. I always felt like I had more to do than I could ever possibly accomplish, and I looked it. And one day Don said to me, you know, Mark, it's never going to be as simple for you as it is right now. And that's really true. Life only does get more complicated after graduate school, and you really enjoy these coming years and immerse yourself in your work. My hope is that the University of Michigan actually changes you and perhaps even more importantly, that you change us. You come from around the country, some of our best universities, but importantly from around the world to contribute to the intellectual community. You're going to end up as amongst the most educated members of society. You'll be leaders in your community, and you'll have the tools and obligation really to make contributions and to lead. Your experience in Michigan, I hope that it's broader actually than just your discipline. Where the Provost said, she hopes that you save time for pursuits outside of academics. I'm such a nerd, I'm going to say I hope you save time for additional pursuits inside of academics. The future is very unpredictable, and you come and train in a discipline. Some of these disciplines have been around for hundreds of years, but my sense is the world is really changing, and you have to take personal responsibility in my opinion for educating yourselves more broadly than simply the confines of your discipline. So you've got the responsibility to become an expert in your field, but I also hope that you take advantage of the rest of what the University of Michigan has to offer and try to learn about things outside of your field. Go to lectures. Some people even pursue the equivalent of a second degree by really taking control and ownership of your education. So if you're an English doctoral student, you know the world is changing, perhaps you should learn a little bit about digital scholarship. If you're an engineering student, maybe you should learn something about the social sciences or humanities, the context in which your work is going to play out over a long career. I also urge you to take full advantage of the opportunity to teach as part of your graduate program, and furthermore to become expert at teaching. Use our Center for Research in Learning and Teaching, the CRLT, is a great resource and although you'll feel as if you've got to be pushing hard at your dissertation all the time, take some time to learn how to teach. It'll be an important part of most of your careers moving forward. I've trained 21 successful doctoral students by working in my lab, and it's actually been amongst the most satisfying aspects of my academic career. The fun part is to see folks come in, students come in, very much in the mode of being students, and to mentor them across their careers and see them end up as colleagues. And I've maintained a relationship with every one of my doctoral students, and it's wonderful to see them become my successors in the academy. On behalf of the faculty here, I'd like to thank you for coming to study with us. Graduate students are key components of our intellectual environment here, and necessary for faculty scholarship. You create the critical mass that makes Michigan a scholarly and academic machine. You're our partners in discovery, our partners in teaching, and we're glad that you've chosen to join us. You have my best wishes as you begin your intellectual journey. Welcome once again to Michigan and go blue.