| Dean's Welcome Letter |
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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 we seek to admit an outstanding group of applicants to join a remarkable community of students and faculty deeply committed to expanding the boundaries of human knowledge and understanding. Between matriculation and graduation fall what many of our graduates consider to be some of the most fulfilling years of their professional lives, years spent immersed in an unparalleled academic environment with peers of outstanding ability and creativity, focused on the most compelling challenges of their chosen fields of study. At the end of this exciting and intense course of study, our PhD recipients go on to hold positions in the front ranks of research and teaching, policy and administration, across the United States and throughout the world. 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 the widest array of seminars, public lectures, performances, and exhibits, as well as opportunities for 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 great attention and care precisely because we are so deeply invested in their development and the important and unique contributions to knowledge and society that they will offer. We hope that you will consider joining us in the remarkable intellectual and social experience that constitutes the pursuit of a Harvard PhD. Allan M Brandt Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Amalie Moses Kass professor of the history of medicine, Harvard Medical School; professor of the history of science, Faculty of Arts and Sciences |