NEW STUDENTS WELCOME MESSAGE
To our incoming graduate students:
Welcome to the College. We are pleased that you chose to attend USF, and will do our best to make sure your time here is both productive and enjoyable. Here are a few ideas that may provide some guidance in the next few years.
Graduate school is a time of transition. It is our job to guide you from an emphasis on mastery of existing knowledge to creation of new knowledge. Your first year will focus on mastery of the basics of oceanography. This truly is an interdisciplinary science and an interdisciplinary school. If you want to understand the effect of climate change on corals, you must understand the biology of corals, the oceanography of currents, the chemistry of carbonates and pollutants, and atmospheric processes that operate on a wide range of time and space scales. After your first year, you should have mastered the fundamentals of atmospheric and ocean currents, the basics of geography, marine biology, chemistry, and geology. This is not just stampcollecting, it forms the larger context into which your research will fit. As you take your graduate courses, however, understand that part of your transition is to take responsibility for the knowledge required for your field. It is no longer the responsibility of your professor to explicitly tell you what to read, you need to explore and make decisions for yourself.
You are transitioning into the world of academic research where peer-reviewed papers are the currency of the realm. As soon as you begin your thesis or dissertation research, you should be thinking about your first paper. A thesis or dissertation is not like an end of term paper. It is composed of a number of separate chapters, several of which can be published as independent papers. So you can write them in smaller increments, and don’t need to wait until everything is finished. As soon as you learn your analytical technique, write it up! As soon as you define your field area, write it up! As soon as you start collecting data, start to write something about what it means. Often the real creativity and insight are developed during the writing process. As you write, you may discover aspects that require more data or a different analytical protocol, so it’s important to start writing as early as possible.
Faculty care deeply about you and your future. However you, and only you, must be responsible for setting your own timetable. You must take control of setting up your committee meetings and making sure that faculty give you timely feed-back on your papers and chapter drafts.
What you do here becomes part of your permanent record. This is where you reputation begins. Work hard. Treat your peers and faculty with respect. Watch your Facebook page. Watch your emails. Don’t put anything in a USF email that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the St. Pete Times.
But most of all, have fun. We are happy that you have decided to join our family. We hope that you become as passionate about understanding and protecting the marine environment as we are.
Jacqueline E. Dixon
Dean, College of Marine Science
(727) 553-3369
