Dean's Welcome Letter
The Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is one of the world’s great institutions of advanced learning, alive with the intellectual energy and commitment of its members. Each year an outstanding group of scholars and scientists joins a distinguished and active faculty to further expand the boundaries of human knowledge and understanding. Each year a group of new PhD recipients sets forth from the festivities of Commencement to take its place in the front ranks of research and teaching, policy and administration, across the United States and throughout the world. Between matriculation and graduation fall what many of our alumni consider to be some of the most exciting and fulfi lling years of their professional lives, years spent immersed in an unparalleled intellectual environment with peers of outstanding ability and creativity, focused on the most compelling challenges of their chosen fields of study.
If you are thinking of applying to the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences , you are contemplating joining a community of over 50 different departments and programs, hundreds of courses, scores of laboratories, libraries, institutes, and centers; of undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and faculty members from every corner of the globe. It is a community where every day offers scores of seminars, public lectures, performances, and exhibits as well as dialogue, quiet study, and focused experimentation. It is a community where one quickly learns that the life of the mind is far from solitary and monastic, but rather at its very core intensely social and collegial. It is a community that you will shape by your presence as you form and test your own ideas, challenging and learning from your mentors and students, expanding your intellectual horizons while deepening your expertise.
We choose our students with care precisely because we are so deeply invested in their development and their ultimate success . We hope that you will consider joining us in the exhilarating intellectual adventure that constitutes the pursuit of a Harvard PhD.
Theda Skocpol, PhD ’75
Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government
and Sociology
If you are thinking of applying to the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences , you are contemplating joining a community of over 50 different departments and programs, hundreds of courses, scores of laboratories, libraries, institutes, and centers; of undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and faculty members from every corner of the globe. It is a community where every day offers scores of seminars, public lectures, performances, and exhibits as well as dialogue, quiet study, and focused experimentation. It is a community where one quickly learns that the life of the mind is far from solitary and monastic, but rather at its very core intensely social and collegial. It is a community that you will shape by your presence as you form and test your own ideas, challenging and learning from your mentors and students, expanding your intellectual horizons while deepening your expertise.
We choose our students with care precisely because we are so deeply invested in their development and their ultimate success . We hope that you will consider joining us in the exhilarating intellectual adventure that constitutes the pursuit of a Harvard PhD.
Theda Skocpol, PhD ’75
Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government
and Sociology