 Good morning. I'm Janet Weiss. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School and I am also thrilled to see all of you here today and to welcome you to Graduate School. I want to say thank you to our Provost Martha Pollock and to our President Mark Schlissel for joining us here. I'm really honored that they are here with us and can help us to convey our welcome to all of you. We have been waiting for you. We have been watching for you since you applied to us almost a year ago. We have been thinking about you, reading about you, talking to you, and finally you're here and that launches us off on an exciting adventure together. Each one of you brings to this experience a unique set of talents and perspectives and you may be hoping that when in Graduate School you're going to meet other people who are just like you and you will but even better you're going to meet a lot of people who are not at all like you. And the amount that you can learn from people who come to Graduate School with very different kinds of backgrounds and experiences is going to be one of the most provocative and stimulating parts of your graduate experience. So it's the engagement and the collision of cultures and experiences that will be one of the most important things that you get out of Graduate School. You are an amazing resource to one another and I'm confident that in the months to come you will really discover this. We've already made reference several of us to the fact that the University of Michigan is an extraordinary intellectual community and of course that's one of the reasons that all of us are here today. But it's not only an extraordinary intellectual community, the University has an extraordinary commitment to sharing the benefits of that excellence throughout society. So a former University President James Angel summed up that twin commitment when he described the University of Michigan's mission as the provision of an uncommon education for the common man. In his era, the late 19th century, one could say common man and mean to include the common woman. And he did mean to include women because women were enrolled at the University as early as 1870, two years before the first African-American men who enrolled in the University in 1868 and 25 years after the first international students enrolled at the University. Of course in those days all of the international students were from Canada. Today our international students come to us from countries all over the world. So there are only a handful of times in your life when you get the opportunity to start a new venture in a way that really allows you to shape who you are as a person in a long-lasting way. So almost all of you are in a new place, many of you in a new country. All of you are embarking on a new life. You'll have the structure and the resources and the gift of time to make yourself the person that you'd like to be in the future. Nan Cohen, who's the former President of Duke University, referred to this really rare and unusual opportunity as self-fashioning. Fashioning, she says, a deliberate and artful activity because you do not want to let events and experiences sweep you along without your conscious participation. So by coming to graduate school, by leaving what you were doing before and coming to graduate school, you've cracked your life open to allow yourself to be changed. But you will benefit the most from this experience if you approach it deliberately and self-consciously to make it work for you. So you are going to find remarkable resources here at the university to support you in your journey of self- fashioning. Thinking about yourself and striving to become the self you want to be is not necessarily easy or simple. And you'll be surrounded by others who have ideas about what you can and should be. And that's part of the joy of coming to a place like Michigan where you're surrounded by other people with extremely high aspirations. Many of your faculty and peers will advise you and mentor you. Much of that guidance will be exciting and scary and mind-stretching and indispensable. But you're never going to find your own self entirely in someone else's expectations or guidance. No two of you have brought to graduate school exactly the same strengths and values. No two of you will have the same experience in your graduate program. And no two of you have the same aspirations for the future. So you need to remain self-conscious about the options in front of you and the choices that you'll make. Your focus, your work, your energies, the way you spend your days will fashion you into the future professional that you aspire to be. Does that mean that each of you is sitting here today knowing exactly what that future is? Of course not. Part of the reason you're here is to learn what's possible. I certainly remember that after my first year in graduate school I was shocked and dismayed to discover that my plans and expectations about what my own career would be were really all wrong for me. And I had to ask myself whether I'd made a terrible mistake by coming to graduate school at all. And maybe I did but I don't think so. I was advised to consider some other possibilities that really hadn't occurred to me before. I did that. I changed my focus and direction and I ended up in a very different career from what I had originally imagined, a career that ultimately I found deeply satisfying. So this might happen to you. You will learn about opportunities in past that you didn't know about before you arrived here. But most importantly you'll find out what really excites you, what feeds you the energy to do great work. So I hope that you'll give yourself the freedom to experiment and to learn. Part of the way to know yourself and to know your strengths is to surround yourself with people and experiences who will stimulate you to become a wiser, broader, more interesting person. Michelle de Montaigne wrote, there's no better school for forming one's life than to set before it constantly the diversity of so many other lives, ideas, customs, and make it taste a perpetual variety of the forms of our own nature. By coming to graduate school at the University of Michigan you are sitting down to an intellectual feast in the company of extraordinary companions. You'll fashion yourself in part by the conversations you choose to have, the collaborations you choose to enter, the differences you choose to explore. So please for your own sake take full advantage of the diversity of the possibilities that you'll encounter here. For the great majority of you this university is much bigger than the institution you attended as an undergraduate and while our size and scope can be overwhelming and confusing at times the best way to compensate for that is to take advantage of the unique assets that come with your choice to come to a large broad heterogeneous institution like this one. We at the graduate school are here to help you, your faculty in your department's programs, schools, and colleges are here to help you to learn about the possibilities and to make the most of your graduate school experience. I do want to echo something that Provost Pollack said which is that part of being at a place like the University of Michigan is to take advantage of opportunities outside of work. We have when I say we have great resources here at the university a lot of what I mean is academic but we have wonderful public art on campus to delight your eye as you move from building to building. We have world-class musicians performing in our venues. We have first-rate athletic competitions in our arenas. We have renowned authors and poets reading their work most days of every week. We have national leaders CEOs who come to speak on campus about the most important developments in the world. We have student organizations that support activities that nourish the soul from tango dancing to go tournaments to hiking to community service. So please take advantage of all the ways in which the university can support you as you embark on your journey. Next it's my pleasure to introduce the Grad Tones. Grad Tones is an acronym as so many things are here at the university. Grad Tones stands for the Graduate Troop of Needlessly Educated Singers. They're an acapella group made up of students pursuing masters and PhD degrees from all over campus. A living example of some of the amazing talent of Rackham graduate students. So please welcome the Grad Tones. So when you walked into the building this morning you might have seen the sign over the door that says Harris H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. And you might be wondering so who is Harris H. Rackham? Harris H. Rackham was a lawyer who worked in Detroit at the turn of the 20th century. One day a young man walked into his office and asked him to draw up incorporation papers for his new company. That young man was Henry Ford. Harris Rackham drew up the incorporation papers for the Ford Motor Company. He loaned Ford some money to build his first factory and in exchange he became one of the first 12 shareholders of the new Ford Motor Company. When Henry and his brother Edsel Ford later bought out those original shareholders Harris Rackham became a very rich man. When he died he left his fortune to his wife Mary. A remarkable woman who never went to college herself but was persuaded that the University of Michigan was a tremendous asset to the state of Michigan and to the country. So she, using Horace's money, created the endowment that built this fabulous building in 1936 and endowed the graduate school. Horace and Mary Rackham made it possible for us to help you just as someday we hope that your brilliant accomplishments will make it possible for us to help the next generation of students after you. So now you know their story and we are all looking forward with great anticipation to the unfolding of your story. I want to thank the many dedicated staff members of Rackham Graduate School who've made this program today possible. Today you're getting your first glimpse of their hard work on behalf of graduate students but they're here. We're here working for you every day and please do take advantage of the programs. We will send you lots of email. If you read it just some of it we will be grateful. After we finish here today there will be an information fair on the second and fourth floors of this building between now and noon. You'll find representatives from about 60 different university units, student organizations, campus and community agencies who want to let you know about their resources. So you'll be able to browse and discover and focus on the things that are of interest to you. In your booklets there's a map of the fair so that you can locate those organizations that are of interest to you. There are people all around wearing blue t-shirts who will be happy to answer any questions and to help direct you. So what I would like to do is ask half of you to stay in this room for a few minutes while the first half leave the auditorium and go upstairs. So what I'd like to do is ask you all to just sit still for a couple minutes while you all will get to stand up and I would ask you to please go on up to the fourth floor first and then after you have patiently waited for a couple minutes it'll be your turn. Thank you very much.