As we reach the final week of the academic year, I want to pause — not with announcements, but with gratitude and reflection.
I recently attended a fireside chat with Barbara Burger, an esteemed scientist and technologist. When students asked how her education had prepared her, she eloquently captured what I have long believed: “I earned a degree in learning.” That is the most honest and most important thing anyone can say about what a great education does. It is not merely about delivering content — content is readily available these days. It builds in you the capacity to keep asking the right questions, to sit with uncertainty, and to grow stronger from the encounter with hard problems.
To our graduating students: you are entering a world that has changed significantly since you arrived at Rice — whether that was one year ago or four, or even longer for our PhD students. AI has advanced at a pace none of us fully anticipated. I genuinely believe that your Rice education has prepared you well for it, not because it taught you everything you will need, but because it taught you how to keep learning — and, just as importantly, how to keep asking the right questions. Answers have never been easier to come by; the right questions have never mattered more. We are proud of you, and we will be watching with admiration.
In a sense, as a school we too earned a degree in learning this year — graduating from our Vision to 2025 strategic plan in December and enrolling in something more ambitious with Vision 2030, which we rolled out last month. We grew our faculty, staff, and student community. We launched an undergraduate major in AI and received approval for a Master of Digital Health, launching this fall. Our people earned honors and recognition across the board — a testament to a community that actively supports and celebrates excellence. And this is only a glimpse of what this community accomplished. It was, by any measure, a remarkable year.
To everyone returning in the fall — students, faculty, and staff — I want to leave you with something to carry into the summer, not as an assignment but as an invitation to reflect. Vision 2030 calls for us to develop the whole engineer: someone with strong technical foundations — the rigorous, principled understanding of their discipline; meaningful experiential learning — the ability to apply knowledge to real, messy, consequential problems; and what we call the human bridge — the leadership, communication, and ethical judgment that allow a technically excellent person to make a real difference in the world. These are not three separate goals. They reinforce each other, and together they define what we are working toward — as educators who deliver this education, and as learners who are shaped by it. How well are we doing? How can we do better?
These questions matter especially now, because AI is changing what it means to work in engineering and computing — making all three dimensions of the whole engineer more important, not less. The world needs engineers and computer scientists who can think rigorously, build meaningfully, and ask not only whether something works, but who it works for.
A liberal arts education has never been more valuable for engineers and computer scientists than it is today. So as you head into the summer, I want to offer something that may sound unexpected from a dean of engineering and computing: give yourself permission to step away from the tools for a while. Read something unhurried — a novel, a work of history, a book of philosophy — and let your own thinking do the work. Seek out conversations with people whose lives and experiences look nothing like yours, and ask yourself what problems they face and whether the things we build here speak to those problems. Then bring those conversations back to Rice in the fall. That is not a detour from your education or your work. It is the best part of it.
To our community of faculty, staff, and students, thank you for a wonderful year. Enjoy a well-earned rest, and I look forward to seeing you in the fall.
The Message from the Dean of Engineering and Computing at Rice University is published quarterly during the academic year, and is shared with our students, faculty, staff and friends.