branch l ines Volume 20 No. 1
2009
Creating Great Graduates
O
UR PREVIOUS ISSUE, profiling a few of our excellent cadre of graduate students in the Faculty of Forestry, received such positive responses that we opted to devote most of this issue to profiling another selection of our current graduate students. We hope you enjoy reading about these remarkable people and their research, and are as inspired by them as we are. The opportunity to work with bright, talented, motivated persons, and assist them in achieving their goals, is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable aspects of a being a professor. It is also one of the most demanding – requiring one to be at various times colleague, critic, coach, mentor and (occasionally) counselor. Done well, supervision of graduate students entails training them in developing their intellectual
and research skills, supporting them with adequate stipends and resources during their program, ensuring that they develop the necessary professional skills to prepare them for the next stage of their career, helping them become networked in the community of
scientists and scholars in their discipline, and assisting them in becoming established in their career once they graduate. Those outside of education who might view a graduate student as “a cheap pair of hands that do the professor’s research” could not be continued on back page