A Message From the Dean

I am pleased to introduce Think, a magazine which links you with graduate education and developments at North Carolina State University. We built our first issue of Think around big ideas. Here’s why:

The NC State University campus comprises many acres. Yet scholarship at the university spreads beyond what was once a traditional campus with discrete boundaries. One of the benefits of the Graduate School’s vantage point on the Centennial Campus is our witnessing the incredible fusion of opportunity with academics.

Researchers, projects, big ideas and big breakthroughs are being born right here.

The wafting construction dust is a constant reminder that opportunities are being formulated alongside visionary scholarship. NC State integrates research, innovation and scholarship with entrepreneurship, one weaving into the other. We are thinking and doing, as is our mission.

Here are only a few examples. Nearby, a toxicology team ponders how to make personal products safer. In another facility, a student seeks to unlock the mysteries of cancer. Another research team tests potentially tainted water from the Cape Fear River Basin. Only a half mile further away, GPS technologies are being used to model how sea level changes may alter our coastline and our environmental future.

And yet, there are no finite boundaries for NC State University, and the big ideas of its past, present and future scholars as they are launched into the greater world.

Big idea people are walking across campus this very moment, lecturing in our campus classrooms, and leading discussions around the world. Our amazing Hunt Library abounds with them.

It is exhilarating to witness our evolution—the extraordinary merger of graduate education and opportunity at NC State University! What a wonderful thing to Think about! Please let us hear from you! You will notice on the attached envelope we want to share your amazing stories.

MAUREEN GRASSO

Read more from the Graduate School’s Think Magazine.

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