Graduate schools hold investitures
By Hanul Kim
Published on Tuesday, June 2, 2009
In addition to the more than 1000 members of the College’s Class of 2009, students from the Tuck School of Business, the Thayer School of Engineering and Dartmouth Medical School will also participate in their respective graduation ceremonies this weekend. Tuck and Thayer will hold their Investiture ceremonies on Saturday, while the Medical School will hold its investiture on Sunday.
Tuck’s graduation ceremony will be held on Saturday afternoon in Tuck Circle.
The business school will distribute 255 degrees in Masters of Business Administration and four joint MD/MBA degrees with DMS. Robert Lane, chairman and chief executive officer of Deere & Company, which sells products and services for agriculture and forestry, will be the ceremony’s keynote speaker.
Igor Macura Tu ’09, whose classmates selected him to speak at Tuck’s Investiture ceremony, told The Dartmouth that his experiences at Tuck have given him “a much more confident approach to problems and a more vocal engagement.”
“Two years ago, I had a feeling that somehow the admissions office had made a mistake in my case in admitting me,” Macura said.
Business administration professor Stephen Powell will conclude the ceremony with the traditional reading of a 1904 letter written by Edward Tuck, who founded the school in 1900, to William Jewett Tucker, the College’s ninth president.
The letter outlines the “vital principles” of Amos Tuck, Edward Tuck’s father and the school’s namesake, which became the school’s foundational principles. The letter’s text hangs on a plaque in the entryway to Tuck Hall.
The tradition of reading the letter is a “really nice tie to what the foundation of Tuck really is,” Katie Flint, assistant director of Tuck’s MBA program office, said.
DMS will hold its graduation ceremony on Sunday morning. Forty-six students will receives Masters of Public Health degrees and 63 will receive a Doctor of Medicine degree.
The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice will also award academic degrees at the College’s Commencement ceremony.
Sixteen students will receives degrees in Master of Arts and 36 in Master of Sciences, and 16 will receive Ph.Ds.
The Medical School’s Class Day, held on Saturday, will feature two student speakers and a keynote address.
The keynote speaker is Donald Ingber, professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the principal investigator at the Ingber Laboratory at Children’s Hospital Boston. The Ingber Laboratory researches how cells communicate and coordinate behavior to form specialized tissues.
Ingber’s work contributed to the discovery of the organizational structure of cells, organs and tissue, and helped establish the new disciplines of mechanobiology, tissue engineering and nanobiotechnology. His work has been recognized by leading institutions including NASA, the American Cancer Society and Stanford’s Mayo Clinic, and has also advised the Department of Defense and the Office of National Intelligence.
The Thayer School will hold its Investiture ceremony on Saturday morning in Spaulding Auditorium. Of the 140 graduating students, 67 received degrees in Bachelors of Engineering, 47 in Masters of Engineering Management and 15 in Masters of Science in Engineering Sciences. The remaining 11 students received a Ph.D in Engineering Sciences.
James Duderstadt, the University of Michigan’s president emeritus and co-chair of the university’s science, technology and public policy program, will deliver the keynote address.
Duderstadt’s work includes contributions to the fields of information technology, nuclear fission research and policy development in energy and higher education. He also directs the Millennium Project, a research center that develops and tests new models of university education.
Duderstadt will receive the Robert Fletcher Award, the Thayer School’s highest recognition for exceptional achievements in engineering, at the ceremony. By tradition, the award’s recipient gives the Investiture ceremony’s keynote speech.
Despite the weak economy, none of the three graduate schools reported any significant changes to their ceremonies.