Duane Larick was officially offered the position of graduate school dean last Tuesday, and accepted the job this week. Larick is filling the position after eight months as interim dean after Terri Lomax took the position of the vice- chancellor of research and graduate studies.  

In addition to the knowledge and practice he has gained these past few months, he has plenty of other experience says Larick.  

“I’ve been at North Carolina State since 1984 and I am a professor at food science…but since 2000 I have been in the graduate school fulltime,” Larick said. “As either an assistant dean, an associate dean, or a senior associate dean, and I have served as interim dean three times.” 

About two years ago Lomax and Larick were the final two candidates for the graduate dean position after a national search and officials took this into account when it came time to hire this time around. 

“Rather than do another national search this soon, the Chancellor, the Provost, the Vice-Chancellor of research and graduate studies thought it was reasonable to ask me if I would be willing do the job on a permanent basis,” said Larick. 

Beyond its typical goals, the University’s focus seems to be on graduate education and to increase enrollment to target said Larick. 

“As we try to reach our enrollment target of 40,000 there is a plan to emphasize graduate education. The graduate school’s role in that will be to help to make sure that we recruit the best and brightest graduate students and we have the best grad programs that we place those students in,” stated Larick.  

Jeffrey Braden, interim CHASS dean, affirmed these aspirations.

“As the money comes back [after the current economic recession] we will be looking to build graduate programs and support undergraduate programs,” said Braden. 

Current criticism of graduate education is centered mainly on communication. 

“It would be helpful to encourage communication between the departments [and] 
graduate school as a whole [in order to provide] students with opportunities to know 
people in other departments,” Molly Brannock, a graduate student currently working towards her PhD. in chemistry, said. 

Addressing the issues brought forward, Larick discussed various programs that help graduate students network with each other and industry.

“We are going to continue to work in our efforts to improve the quality of graduate education by work[ing] very hard on our ‘Preparing the Future Leaders’ program, an example of programs that we are putting together for graduate students,” he said. “We are going to continue to create unique graduate programs – we have an emphasis right now…[on] a neat industry university partnership at the master’s level, so we will continue to grow those types of programs.” 

“[The goal is] to make North Carolina State one of the leaders in graduate education and make it a place students want to come.”