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Leadership

A message from the Chancellor: The impact of our graduate students

Our role as a leading global public research university wouldn’t be possible without the graduate students who teach, serve in our communities, and create new knowledge through their original scholarship.

The Old Well during winter with a dark sky.

Dear Carolina Community,

If you’ve ever found yourself nervously checking your phone, waiting for likes and comments and reactions, Maria Maza and Kara Fox have an idea why. These two doctoral students in psychology helped lead a fascinating study, supported by the Winston Family Foundation, about the impact of habitual social media use among adolescents. Their work offers crucial insights about the way online life may be subtly rewiring our brains and making us more sensitive to social feedback.

It’s just one of the many urgent and interesting questions that graduate students at Carolina are tackling every day. Our role as a leading global public research university wouldn’t be possible without the graduate students who teach, serve in our communities, and create new knowledge through their original scholarship.

Their work and that of so many other graduate students demonstrate the importance of our largest-ever increase for graduate stipends. This well-earned step will bolster the amazing work they do every day, and I hope we can make even more progress in the years to come.

Many of Carolina’s talented graduate students will continue to push the boundaries of their disciplines in academia, while many others will pursue important work in government, in private-sector research and development, or in service organizations across the world. The skills of deep thinking, evidence gathering and rigorous analysis that we expect of graduate students are in high demand, and I love hearing about the different paths our graduates take.

Working alongside top-tier graduate students in my own lab — smart, driven colleagues who challenged my thinking and made a real difference in our field of concussion research — has been one of the greatest joys of my professional life. I know many of our faculty feel the same.

Alongside our university leadership, I am continuing to look for new ways that we can show our commitment to these incredible students. We must build research and innovation spaces that provide the tools and resources graduate students need to succeed as the future academics, leaders and inventors of our world.

Sincerely,

Kevin M. GuskiewiczChancellor