 Good morning, morning, welcome to the University of Michigan. I'm looking out at an incredibly talented, intelligent, creative group of people. I know that because we have outstanding faculty here and our faculty have a very high bar for the students they consider and the students they admit. So congratulations on being admitted to graduate school here and we're so delighted that you've joined us. I wanna tell you a little story. It's a story about two graduate students and a professor who were walking across our dyag one day and they came across an oil lamp. And what do you do when you find an oil lamp? You rub it and what happens? A genie pops out. So this genie pops out. This happens all dressed in maize and blue and the genie says, you know, traditionally we give three wishes. There are three of you. I'm gonna give each of you one wish. And the first graduate student gets really excited and says, me, me, me, I wanna be on a beach in Tahiti. Genie says, sure. And poof, the graduate student is gone. So now the second graduate student gets really big eyes and says, I wanna be hella skiing in the Canadian Rockies. No problem says the genie poof and that graduate student is gone. And the genie turns to the professor and says, what about you? What do you want? And with a twinkle in her eye, she says, I want those two back in the lab right after lunch. Now, like all good stories, there's a grain of truth to this story. You're gonna work incredibly hard in graduate school, probably harder than you ever have in your life. Your professors are gonna push you, but they're also gonna encourage you and guide you and help you and cheer lead. So work closely with them. And if you do that, what I can almost guarantee will happen is that you'll come upon what Richard Feynman, the physicist called the kick of discovery, that magical moment when you come to understand and see something that no one else before has ever understood or seen. And the rewards will be enormous. The other thing I want you to do, I want you to work incredibly hard, but I want you to remember to find at least a little bit of time for interest outside of your studies, for your family, for your friends, for outside activities. Even the professor in my story didn't have their students come back right away. She gave them the morning off. So welcome to Michigan. Work hard, find that kick of discovery, and have a great time here. It's now my great pleasure to introduce the 14th president of the University of Michigan, Dr. Mark Schlissel. Dr. Schlissel. We'll talk to you for a second. I was gonna tell you a little bit about him. He got his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his MD and PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where after a postdoc he was on the faculty. He then joined the faculty at Berkeley where he became dean of the biological sciences and went on to Brown University where he served as provost before joining us here at Michigan this past August. Today he is not only president, he is also professor of microbiology and immunology in the College of Medicine, and professor of molecular cellular and developmental biology in LSNA. Please welcome President Schlissel. 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 that drew me 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 as 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 endpoint as a graduate student as there was when you were undergraduates. Actually, when I would speak at graduation exercises for doctoral students 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 gonna be in the future. You're not gonna 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 academicians 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 at it. And one day, Don said to me, you know, Mark, it's never gonna 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 should 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gotta 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, as 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 the 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. 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 wanna say thank you to our Provost, Martha Pollock, and to our President, Mark Schlissel, for joining us here. I'm really honored that they're 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 gonna meet other people who are just like you, and you will, but even better, you're gonna 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 gonna 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 Kohane, 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 wanna 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 gonna 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 Montegna 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 wanna echo something that Provost Pollock said, which is that part of being at a place like the University of Michigan is to take advantage of opportunities outside of work. 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. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Hello and good morning. Mine. My name is Sam Heiderprimm. I'm a co-president of the grad tones. And on behalf of the group I'd like to say welcome to the university. Ann Arbor is a great place to study and work. So we, the grad tones, are the only interdisciplinary singing group that is welcome to all Rackham graduate students. Right now, the group comprises people studying chemistry, ecology, biostatistics, chemical biology, computer science, poetry, all kinds of engineering. I do German, we're pretty much all over the place, and very diverse, and it's a lot of fun to get to know people from other programs because it can be sort of easy to get locked in to your own little world with your own research. Anyway, the group is about two thirds of its normal size right now. We recently lost a lot of members and we are in a big recruiting push. So if you like to sing, please come check us out. We're having a big informational meeting in a couple Tuesdays. It's Tuesday the 9th of September, 7.30 p.m. in the Welker Room over in the Michigan League, which is building across the street and by the fountain. You can find more information on our website, gradtones.com, but again, we encourage you to come and at least learn about the group if you do like to sing. Again, September 9th, 7.30 p.m. in the Welker Room of the Michigan League. So what we're just saying is a song called Hail to the Victors, it's the school fight song. If you go to a football game, you'll hear it a lot probably. It was written by a very enthusiastic Michigan undergraduate named Louis Elbell all the way back in 1898 after a big football victory. The next song that we'll sing and what we'll leave you with is a song written exactly 100 years later by a duo of Swedish songwriters for an American boy band named The Backstreet Boys. We hope you like it. You are desired. Thanks, everybody. September 9th, 7.30 p.m. Be there. Well, that was a tough act to follow. I could beat box for you. Take me back a little. So my name is Stephanie Rowley and I'm a professor in psychology. I'm also the chair of psychology right now and I am just really excited to see you all here. So I just absolutely love the first day of school, the whole idea of looking forward to all the possibilities and excitement. And I think there's something really special about graduate school that you have opted to really move into a space that lots of people are not able to. So I'm always fascinated by the fact that really a small number of people, less than 10% actually, end up doing a master's or doctorate. And then you add to that that you all have chosen to come to the absolute finest place of higher education in the world. Pretty impressive. So congratulations for making the right choice in that. You're laughing, but I actually know a lot about this. So I have been connected to the University of Michigan my entire life. You might think I exaggerate all the time. My students might say that I do. But my dad was an alum of Michigan. So back in the 60s, he was a student here. And my brother was a student here in the 80s. And I was a student here in the 90s. And so I really do know a lot about Michigan. So I can really say confidently that this really is the best university in the world. And I mean, I think there's also some data that would lead in that direction. And I have been other places. So this is not the only place I've been. I went to the University of Virginia for graduate school, which was really wonderful. And then I taught for three years at UNC Chapel Hill. And this is still the best place in the world. And you are the best students in the world. So one of the things that often happens when you get here as a student is once you start classes, you kind of forget about the rigorous process that you and we went through to get you here. As someone who has chaired many, many admissions committees, I know that we spend tireless hours. We look at every application. We sit down and imagine each of you being here with us. And so it's not a mistake. So when next week you start classes and it feels like maybe everybody knows something that you don't know or everybody's been someplace you haven't been or worked with some famous person someplace else that you haven't been able to work with, remember that we chose you on purpose and that we're very serious about this and that our students are really our best asset. So I just had two students finish, Adriana and Sarah. And one of my first year students said, isn't it really sad when your students move on and you have to do this kind of over and over again? And I said, absolutely. So these are doctoral students. So they worked with me for five years. And it is really sad. In fact, I was up really late last night until 1030 texting Sarah. She just took a postdoc position. And we were saying how much we miss talking and hanging out. So my students really are just amazing. They really enrich my own work. I can give you lots of examples of where students working with faculty members took them on a completely new pathway that really opened up their research. So you should never underestimate your value to us as faculty for sure. And you should feel really confident in contributing to the work that's going on here at Michigan. Because if it weren't for you, our work I think really would stagnate. So I wanted to tell you a story about one of my students. He graduated several years ago now, maybe five or six years ago. I'll call him Jamie, just because there are people in the room who might know him, but. So we had a really hard time. I think a lot of times the first day of school everybody wants to tell you all the positive stories. But we had a really hard time. So he wasn't sure he wanted to come to graduate school. He was really engaged with a bunch of things in the community back in New York where he grew up. And felt like he was a teacher. He felt like he was selling out the kids who he had been working so closely with. Low income, really poor kids in inner city New York. And he thought that maybe by doing this intellectual thing that he wasn't doing the right thing. And then he also felt a little different. I think coming from, how many people are from New York? So this is not New York. This is, the culture is a little different. He felt a little different when he got here. He also didn't have a traditional academic path. So he, one of my favorite stories was that he started out kindergarten. They told him that he couldn't start in this special private school because he was mentally retarded. They told his parents that he was never gonna really do well in school and that he would need some specialized help. So this is Dr. Jamie at the moment. So I think he was always a little bit shy about academics. And the first two years, boy, he would come to my office and we had these weird conversations where we didn't make eye contact, just didn't connect and just felt like he was turning and his work really late. And oftentimes it was too late for me to give proper feedback and it just didn't feel too good to me. I can only imagine how I felt to him. Well, it all came to a head. So in this particular program, we have a portfolio experience, which is really nice. So we have three faculty members who come and look at all of the work that you've done over the first three years. And one of the pieces is a reflection paper. So oddly enough, the reflection wasn't part of his portfolio before we got to the meeting, which is not that surprising. It's just a couple of pages about what their first few years were like. Well, imagine my surprise when I opened the document and it was full of anger and disappointment saying, this program is terrible. I haven't gotten good feedback. I haven't gotten good mentoring. Nobody's taking care of me. And of course this is directed at me. I was, whoa. So here I had thought that he didn't like me and that the reason we weren't connecting was because there was something about me that he didn't like. Here he was thinking it was something about him that I didn't like him for summer. And it wasn't just me, but other advisors of his. So we had an interesting meeting, as you might imagine. We sat down and we spent the whole meeting instead of talking about his academic record, we talked about the issues that he had laid out in his reflection paper. It was a hard meeting, you can imagine. But at the end of the meeting, what we realized is that we had sort of been working at cross purposes and not hearing or seeing each other. So after the meeting, he actually brought me flowers, which was nice. But after the meeting, we spent time building a relationship. So we spent time really talking about what his goals were, where he was headed, what he wanted out of life, and some of the problems that we had had as a mentor and mentee. And we really got on a good foot after that. So I learned a few things from that interaction. So I should tell you the end of the story first, which is a really wonderful story. So he ended up really flourishing after that, connected with a bunch of peers. So one of the things is he was pretty socially isolated, but after that, I told him that lots of other students had had similar feelings about the program and that if he had connected with them, he might have a sense of how they had dealt with feeling isolated, feeling different. Also, he was able to develop a group of friends that he worked with and collaborated with. And so his work really took off in terms of his research productivity. He also got some help. He went to Sweetland Writing Center and got feedback on his writing, which was one of the sticking points of his early career, which was really helpful. A wonderful resource. I think everyone sitting in the room should go to Sweetland. They have counselors there who can, or consultants who sit there and work through your writing issues. We all have something. And then the other thing is we opened up really valuable communication. So he goes on to write this amazing dissertation. This dissertation won, first, the ProQuest Dissertation Award, which is an external award that's judged by the ProQuest Corporation that is here in Ann Arbor. He won an American Psychological Association Dissertation Award. He won an internal award to the School of Education. He has gotten NSF grants. He's doing really well as a professor. He got a faculty position right after school. So imagine he became wildly successful after this. A few lessons that we learned. The first thing is that difficult things happen in graduate school. It's not easy. Otherwise, everyone would do it. The issue is not whether or not you face difficulty and adversity, but how you respond to it. I think in Jamie's case, he said I had some misperceptions, I corrected them, and then I moved on and really, I mean, it took a lot for him to make himself vulnerable in that position. And so you can imagine, there will be times when something happens, when you need to be vulnerable to go to your advisor, your professor, your friend, and say, look, I messed up. What can we do to fix this? I also had to do the same thing, by the way. But really, he stepped up to the plate and was an adult about it and said I want something out of this. And if I don't do something different, I'm not going to get it. Each of you deserves really great mentoring, great instruction, and sometimes you have to ask for it. Sometimes it's not there in the way that it should be. The second thing was, he learned to embrace his weakness. This is painful. Part of graduate school, everyone comes with a set of skills that's why you're here. Everyone has had wonderful experiences and been a great student, and everyone has weaknesses. And if you leave here with those same weaknesses, you have cheated yourself, you've cheated the world, you've spent somebody's money and really ended not with what you came to get. Embrace your weaknesses. Acknowledge that, write them down and then come up with a plan for how you'll address them. He went to the Writing Center. He sat down with me and said, tell me what my strengths and weaknesses are. And we came up with a plan. He utilized his peer resources and said, how have you dealt with whatever the issue is? You have to be vulnerable. I had a similar experience. As a grad student, I was a stats consultant. I was great at stats. It's a long time ago. But I was not a good writer. I was not a good writer at all. And people let me go and I let myself go. And so I graduated. I had all these publications because everybody wanted me on their publications because I could do stats. But when I became an assistant professor, I couldn't write. And so I'm getting these reviews back on these papers and they're saying, oh, great stats, but the writing sucks. And so I had to humble myself and get help. I had to go to my colleagues and say, I don't know how to do this. Can you help me? Really deeply painful. If I had done it when I was a graduate student, imagine how much time I could have saved as an assistant professor. Thankfully it all worked out. So really developing a network of people who can help and support you. The last thing is really impression management. There's a strong pull for graduate students to appear to be all together all the time. Nobody is all together all the time. And if you allow your fear of looking stupid, of asking the stupid question in class, of, you know, you don't wanna ask too many stupid questions in class because you do wanna appear to be confident, but there are ways to find out. There are ways to utilize your resources in order to help with that. Of course you don't want to give in to this imposter syndrome that everybody feels at some point in graduate school. That sense that everybody else knows something that you don't or that you're not as well prepared as you should be. Take that as a signal, one of things to work on, but also as a signal that really, you know, other people are feeling the same way and often they're putting their best foot forward and maybe their best foot is a little different than what your best foot is, but don't confuse that for being inferior or less than. So I offer you Jamie's story as a cautionary tale. Difficult things will happen. Relationships are hard. We misinterpret things. Emotions are all tied up in graduate school. If it were easy, everyone would do it. I think a lot of times we pretend like the emotional part is not there. Another wonderful thing is that we have Rackham here to support. I have been involved with lots of Rackham programs over the years. My husband, Larry, who is on the fourth floor, oh, he's in the back, there's my husband, Larry. He came back to hear me. They're here to help you. We have a whole office of graduate students success here to help you to work through some of these issues and to sometimes just be a sounding board. So I encourage you all to use those resources. So as everyone has said, take full advantage of what you have here, what there is to offer in terms of academics, opportunities to collaborate, outstanding faculty and staff, and fun. So I picked up a husband in graduate school, which was really nice. You can, too, but I also made lots of friends who are lifelong friends. I also remain in contact with my advisors. I also remain in contact with my student advisies. So this is not a time to put life on pause, but rather to embrace it and to think about how this is really a starting point of new relationships and so much excitement to come. So happy first day of school. I hope you're as excited as I am. It's an honor to be here to talk to you today. So congratulations on making the best decision of your life and go blue. I nearly forgot, in my excitement about the first day, to introduce Phil Saccone, who is going to be speaking to you next. So Phil is a PhD candidate in pharmacology and the president of the Rackham student government. So welcome, Phil. All right, hello, everybody. Thank you, Stephanie, for the introduction. My name is Phil Saccone, and I am the president of the Rackham student government. On behalf of the student body, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you all here today as you begin the next chapter of your academic life. I would also like to extend a special thanks to our new president for speaking at orientation today. We're very excited here at the graduate school to be moving forward under his leadership, and I hope that he will join us again for next year's orientation. So here at Rackham, we've been preparing for your arrival for at least the last six months or so, so it's very exciting to see everybody finally sitting here. Welcome again. How many of you guys just arrived here in Ann Arbor in the last week or so? Let's see if I show our hands. Okay, nice. And how many people have been here for about a month or so? All right, about half and half. How many of you are coming to us from warm climates? You have chosen unwisely. Full length jackets, down, waterproof, hats, gloves, things like that. Those months are gonna be very productive though. A lot of grant writing, a lot of data getting recorded, a lot of PIs being happy. So we're very much looking forward to having you here and hosting you throughout the day. We're hoping that you guys will come to the full orientation picnic, which is happening at five o'clock this afternoon. We've got yard games, we have a DJ, lots of good food. We even have a bounce house. So hopefully you guys will come and enjoy the festivities. Then you guys are gonna have a wonderful long weekend coming. Maybe you'll take in a tailgate or bounce home to see some friends, relax a little bit, and then before you know it, Tuesday is gonna arrive. The breakfast buffets will cease and the real work is gonna begin. But have no fear, because you're joining a community with a rich academic and social heritage. And you guys out there represent our future. On Tuesday, you're gonna be asked to shoulder more responsibility than you likely ever had before. You're going to learn to master your subject, add one of the finest institutions populated with some of the finest faculty in the world. But it's going to be up to you. In the undergraduate world, people told you what to do. They mapped out a plan and all you needed to do was walk the path. Now the goal is to develop mastery of your subject by being independent. And therein will be your challenge. But you have to keep in mind that you were accepted here because you have the talent. You have the skills. You're among the leaders and the best now and that's why you're all here. And out of Ohio State. So I'm about to enter my fourth year of graduate school and I've been trying to sit around and reflect on what I've learned and enjoyed most about being a graduate student. And of course what would be best for me to pass on to you. And obviously I love what I study. It would be highly unlikely for me to be doing what I'm doing here anywhere else. In graduate school it's expected that you'll learn with a certain amount of independence. And there's a confidence that evolves through achievement in that environment. And if you'll forgive me a very corny metaphor, it's like learning to ride a two-wheeler. When you first try to stand up on it you're probably going to lose your balance. You're going to be overly concerned with falling. But fortunately you've got someone behind you who's going to have their hand ever so gently on the seat making sure that you don't hurt yourself too badly. And depending on what you're doing your graduate studies and that can have a whole lot of implications. Soon enough you're comfortable with that scenario and you get the bike gliding along and all of a sudden you look back and feeling pretty good about everything and you realize the hand isn't there anymore. And that's when I think you'll really feel like you've arrived in graduate school. So don't be afraid to take risks. This is the environment to be creative, to push the limits of your field for both your benefit and also for the benefit of your colleagues. In addition to my research, I really enjoy being a part of the broader community. So we have over 1200 organizations here. There's a sailing club, there's ballroom dancing, there's countless intramural sports, there's of course your Iraqum student government. Feel free to come check us out. And participation in this community I think will give your graduate school experience a lot of texture. And it's important to make time for yourself. I'm gonna echo what everybody else has set up here. You know, make time for yourself, the other passions in your life because it reminds you that the world is bigger than just what you study. So there are more practical things that I can impart on to you besides all of that, some hard and fast rules for graduate school. So the first is find lectures, symposium and student organizations that serve food at their meetings. Second, be a friend to yourself. Don't get too tired or hungry and if you seem like you're having a tough time, things are not going your way. Remember that you're in good company. No matter how in control, everybody else seems to be. The angst generated by graduate school is common to all of us. And lastly, when something good happens, if you publish a paper, if you get good data or a student that you've been teaching comes up and tells you how you've affected positive change in their life in some way, go celebrate. Have a good time with friends and family, take a step back and appreciate and celebrate your accomplishment. And when it's all said and done and graduation is upon you and you move on from Michigan, just remember that everywhere you go, go blue. Thanks guys. So when you walked into the building this morning, you might have seen the sign over the door that says Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. And you might be wondering, so who is Horace H. Rackham? Horace H. Rackham was a lawyer, 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. Horace 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, Horace 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 some day 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 wanna 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'll 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 wanna 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. And 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.