A Word to Prospective Graduate Students

We are pleased to learn that you are considering the Yale Chemistry Department as the place to earn your Ph.D. degree. In this brochure we have tried to describe some of the activities available to you at Yale and what it is like to live in the New Haven Community. We hope that you will see that Yale is an exciting place to pursue graduate studies - which indeed it is.

We are proud of our history, of our faculty, of our laboratories, instrumentation, and libraries and of our relations with industry. Most of all, we are proud of our students and of their research. Good teaching and good research thrive on good students. Research takes on a new sparkle in the years that follow the admission of a particularly strong graduate class. We are always hopeful that we are training another Nobel Laureate, as well as a great many leaders of academic and industrial research.

In the Yale Chemistry Department, the faculty works very closely with graduate students and is deeply concerned with the quality of the graduate experience. This concern is reflected in the high success rate of our Ph.D. candidates, both at Yale and in their subsequent careers.

We believe that a productive attitude is a critical component of the success in our department. Research is an adventure and it should be fun. While we encourage our students to set high standards for themselves, we also try to foster an ambiance for work and study that is informal and emphasizes mutual support over internal competition. Your contact with the faculty will be relaxed and continuous. We think you will find the other graduate students in our Department as congenial and interesting as we on the faculty do. They are a gifted, lively, international group with interests and talents that range widely within and beyond science.

Your selection of a graduate school will probably be among the most important choices you will make. We are confident that you will like what you find at Yale, and we urge you to visit and ask questions of students and faculty, so that you can judge this for yourself. Before your visit call, write, or e-mail us so we can arrange for you to meet with faculty and students whose research is of special interest to you.

Gary Brudvig, Chair

Last modified: June 7, 2005 (kp)