Alumni Magazine - Fall 2008 - (Page 35) Tech’s history and the institution that we are, we are very good and very well recognized for being technically right near the very top. But intellectually — and there’s a difference between the technical side and the intellectual side — the intellectual side hasn’t caught up with the technical side of the campus. Georgia Tech is a great place with a great reputation and widely respected nationally and internationally. That doesn’t mean that we’re as good as we can be. The next level is to deepen that leadership role that we have and to encourage our students to think more broadly, to think outside of their disciplines, to take that chemist and teach him also to be a comedian, to not be afraid to be up on the stage. We have many leaders within our disciplines. We need to nurture and develop more of our faculty, students and staff to have influence beyond their disciplines. that environment, we have to guess what the future is going to be. If you guess accurately, or you do your best to do that, you steer yourself toward those goals and you’re right more often or at least some of the time, the world is going to recognize you for being able to ask the right questions, not only to answer the ones that already exist. What areas do you believe will drive Tech’s growth in research awards and expenditures? The answer is creativity. Creativity is the rarest of human commodities. The way that I often characterize it is that a lot of people, really clever people, know what to do next. The really creative ones, the ones who really understand their field, know what to do. There’s often a difference between knowing what to do next and knowing what to do. What will drive Georgia Tech and its reputation and its ability to maintain its leading roles in research and sponsored funding is being able to bring to our campus those people who know what to do. GT How do you do that? You develop a reputation for being able to ask the right questions, not only provide the right answers. I’m fond of quoting Yogi Berra, who said that you should never predict anything and especially the future, but really that’s the job that we’re in, trying to guess what the future’s going to look like. We do that in the education of our students. They’re going to live their lives in the 21st century and nobody knows what the 21st century is going to look like, but we have to prepare our students to live in
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