Achievement

One of the most notable educational achievements is our students’ realization of self-empowerment. Perhaps the most obvious example of such growth is reflected by how the graduate students responded to being given a “free-hand” in developing and refining the concepts central to our soon-to-be released, layperson-styled video “What is Nanoscience.” Early in the process, most of the students, including our IGERT trainees, were very uncomfortable with even the conceptualization phase of the effort. However, the process accelerated as the class learned that the creative process is often inefficient and that the path to the completion of the “product” itself was, in the final analysis, all about innovative ideas (i.e., there is no such thing as a foolish idea). That is, once the students became comfortable being pulled outside their comfort zone, the ideas literally flew of the shelf and the class meetings began to resemble those reminiscent of a true think tank.