E-Mail/Letters

The family that dissertates together...

Thank you for bringing up the important issue of the graduate educational environment at Columbia ["Why so much slack in American science education?" Winter 1997]. Having just completed my PhD, I can assure you that the single most important factor that determines the experience throughout the years of graduate education is the relationship with the thesis advisor‹yet it seems that there is no visible effort on the part of the university to help both students and advisors make the most out of it. Dysfunctional academic "families" are, thus, not all that impossible to evolve.

Igor Ilic, PhD '97
Electrical Engineering

Author Fawaz El-Habel replies:

I agree with Dr. Ilic on the importance of the student-advisor relationship, which is crucial to proper graduate education. In those cases of dysfunctional academic families, there is always a waste of time, effort, and money from both sides, with the negative outcome affecting lives and careers.

The wisdom of the off switch

Reading "Training Physicians for the Future" [Winter 1997], I was particularly struck by Dr. Chase's conclusion that the computer is of value only if one can recognize when "information is in fact knowledge." I wish to extend this idea, and propose that just as knowledge comes only from appropriately evalauted information, true wisdom comes only from appropriately evaluated knowledge. As T. S. Eliot wrote in "The Rock":

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

To become truly wise, one has not only to learn how to obtain information and to distinguish which information is important, but also to learn when it is best to stop searching for knowledge and when it is best not to know. This would probably sound like anathema to the pure scientist, who is likely to feel that it is never best not to know. I disagree.

Certainly, the purpose of a specific electronic curriculum in medical school should be to teach the student how to navigate through immense amounts of information, and how to do this in the future when he or she is out on his or her own. I believe, however, that there should be an important additional goal: to help the student to learn when it is time to turn the computer off.

Gregory A. Abel
College of Physicians and Surgeons, '00

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