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Class of 2013 Meets the Dean
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Students from the Class of 2013 squeezed into Beury Hall on August 30 for the College's official Meet the Dean event. Dean Hai-Lung Dai made introductory remarks and James Guare (BA '77, MA '83, Chem) and Justin Stephan (BS '09, CIS) shared advice on how to make the most of a Temple education.
Guare was one of the first medicinal research chemists to work on HIV drugs and a member of the research team that developed the revolutionary drug Crixivan, which helped save millions of lives and transformed HIV infection from a death sentence to a manageable condition. Guare and his fellow chemists won the National Inventor of the Year award in 1997and the American Chemical Society Creative Invention award in 1998.
Stephan graduated summa cum laude in January 2009 with a BS degree in Information Science and Technology. A student advisor and computer laboratory consultant while at Temple, he is now a software devloper at Almac Clinical Technologies, a company that employs nearly a dozen recent CST graduates.
Dean Dai welcomed the students with a quote from Confucius: "A scholar works on the basics; when the basics are set right, the way will naturally appear." Dean Dai went on to explain:
For studying science, the advice from Confucius is particularly relevant. Look at this Blackberry phone – to be able to make this, knowledge from centuries of investigations and discoveries is required. You need to know classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, synthetic chemistry, polymer chemistry, surface science, numbers theory, algorithms … all this before you understand how a Blackberry works. The situation is the same whether you want to be a doctor or work in the pharmaceutical industry. We do not expect you to learn all this in college. We expect you to learn the basics so you have the foundation to learn more in the future. Learning science is like climbing a mountain: the higher you get, the farther you can see. But to get to the top you have to start from the bottom, one foot at a time. Building the foundation starts now.
More than 1100 students joined the College in Fall 2009. Nearly 800 are freshman while more than 300 are transfer students. Biology has the most incoming undergraduate students, with more than 500, while CIS has the second most, with nearly 100.