Few things in life can compete with the teaching of eager, talented, well-prepared, and demanding students who crave, in fact, demand, precision and excellence. For me, this is what makes Berkeley such a wonderful place. Nearly every day I congratulate myself on my great fortune to be a member of this faculty. How lucky I really am! Delivery of a great lecture with humor, abstraction, complexity and, ah yes, clarity is a heady feeling indeed. The students too often respond with appreciation beyond what is merited. But to the culpable presenter, the accolades serve only to press for the higher standard in the hope that those received might subsequently be deserved. Of course, this zenith is rarely reached. However, the capacity of a lecture, or even a few sentences, to turn a mind in a new direction is a marvel of human discourse. Though I, like many, talk of new teaching methods and technologies, I must admit that I cannot see how this fundamental interchange between student and professor, eye to eye, mind against mind, can be replaced.

The nurturing of graduate students from university admission to doctorate, from student to scholar, and from neophyte professional to a figure of national repute is a responsibility of monumental proportions. What greater impact can one have in a professional life than to nurture a student to a level of independent and distinguished achievement? The teaching of doctoral students includes instruction and advising in the research specialty, as expected, but it also includes training them to become research professionals. On one day a student is about to complete the doctoral program, and the next the young doctorate ventures into the professional world, properly prepared by graduate study. That preparation is what graduate teaching and a graduate program are all about. Frankly, meeting the doctoral graduates of the doctoral graduates of your former doctoral students drives home the impact that one professor can have on a field and on the lives of many admirable people.