For Graduates
I. History Review
China University of Geosciences is within the first group of universities being authorized to establish graduate school. In the early years of its foundation, the university set up its graduate school with the graduates from Beijing University, Peking University, Tianjin University, and Tangshan Railway Institute. In 1953, CUG Graduate School started its recruitment of graduates; the number of graduates reached 147 in 1961 and 321 before the Cultural Revolation.During the Cultural Revolution, the graduate education was suspended. It was not until 1978 was the recruitment of masters resumed. The recruitment of doctors started from 1982.
In 1986, the Chinese Government ratified the foundation of the Graduate School of Wuhan College of Geology.With the foundation of CUG in 1987, the Graduate School was renamed as CUG Graduate School.After the development of over 50 years, the university has already formed a professional graduate education system with obvious advantages in sciences and engineering and coordinate development in liberal arts, management, economics and laws. Thus, CUG has become a very important base for the cultivation of both geological and non-geological graduates. Since the resumption of the recruitment of graduates in 1978, as many as 2000 graduates have been conferred diplomas, including 300 doctors, about 1700 masters, 19 international students, and 100 masters of engineering. In the evaluation of 33 national graduate schools in 1996, the discipline construction and quality of thesis in CUG Graduate School was ranked in the top 5. In 1999, it is also hornored with the title of “National Advanced Unit in the Management of Diplomas and Graduate Education”.
Ⅱ. Grasping the Point: Boosting the Discipline Constrution
In recent years, the Graduate School has increased the propaganda of recruitment of graduate students and enlarged the scale of publicity. As a result, the resources of students have greatly augmented, and the enrollment has been increasing year by year. The current doctors, masters, masters of engineering, international students and students attending in an advanced studies total about 3000. Furthermore, the school is also honored as one of the excellent examination spots in the academic year of 2000-2001.
The construction of disciplines and supervising groups, and the continuous improvement of the running of Graduate School are the key points for excellent achievements in graduate education. After years of construction and development, CUG (Wuhan) already owns 5 state key disciplines, 11 key disciplines at provincial and ministerial level, 11 authorized doctoral programs, 34 master’s programs, 8 fields of engineering to recruit masters of engineering, two granted top disciplines, and 2 post-doctoral working stations. Moreover, non-geological graduate programs have already exceeded the traditional geological programs, resulting in a great change in the former monotonous discipline construction. Thanks to the application of various measures, the university now has owned a group of highly qualified graduate supervisors, including 9 academicians of Chinese Academy of Sciences and academicians of foreign nationalities, 86 doctoral supervisors. The number of professors has increased to 200 and that of associate professors has reached to 360 in 2001.
Ⅲ. Emphasizing Quality: A New Stage
The quality of graduate cultivation is a lifeline for graduate education. The university has raised the educational principle regarding the improvement of quality as its center. It has also carried out a series of reforms to actualize this principle. For example, the Graduate School has revised the graduate cultivation schemes for five times; it has also endeavored to optimize the course system and emphasize the quality of course-teaching; it practices a supervisor-system, and adheres to the filtration of graduates at metaphase, encouraging excellent graduates to graduate ahead of schedule or further pursue the Docotor’s Degree; the school also carries out a successive way of combining master’s studies and doctor’s studies together, thus making talents showing themselves, etc. The rapid progress of science and technology in the 21st century, the fierce international competition, and the new situation in the market economy have raised high demands for senior talents. In order to adapt to the demands, the university has greatly strengthened the graduate education in science and technology. It has taken the lead in putting forward an innovative new way of implementing creative education to doctors and training highly qualified senior talents with creativities. Many achievements, such as “Research and Practice on the Graduate Cultivation Mode and the Course System under New Circumstances”, “Research on the Demands, Knowledge Construction, and Cultivation Mode of Cross-century Geological Masters and Doctors”, and “Research on the Index System of the Evaluation of Dissertation”, etc, have won prizes at provincial and ministerial level.
Dissertation is the materialzation of the graduates’ ability in absorbing knowledge, exerting creativities, improving comprehensive makings, and perfecting academic attainments. In order to continuously boost the graduates’ ability in composing dissertations, Graduate School gives prominence to the training of creative consciousness and innovative capabilities, and runs it in the whole process of graduate education as well. The school adopts the credit system, requiring graduate students to publish a certain number of academic theses concerning their respective research branches before the presentation of dissertation. It has also changed the scholarship of the third academic year into awards for the publication of academic theses, giving students a certain amount of award for the publication of each thesis. A system requiring the proposal for dissertation, and the implementation of submitting graduation papers for the evaluation of anomynous and foreign experts have been greatly emphasized. The schools also ask graduates to present their dissertation in English. As a result, the number of published academic theses is remarkably increased, and the quality of dissertations has also been continuously improving. For example, the doctoral dissertations of Li Xinzhong and Zhang Kexin have respectively won the national award for “100 Excellent Doctoral Dissertations” in 1999 and 2002; in addition, other 16 doctoral dissertations have won similar awards at provincial level.
In the academic year of 2001 to 2002, 52 theses written by graduates in the school have entered SCI,EI and ISTP;20 have been published in overseas journals and magazines and 95 were submitted to some international conferences for academic exchanges. Over 1894 theses have been published nationally and 188 were submitted to some national academic conferences as well.
Graduate School attaches great importance to the cultivation of comprehensive makings of graduate students, and strengthens the education of Marxism theory, moralities and patriotism. It has encouraged students to participate in various kinds of activities such as donations, social practices, and fighting against bloods etc. A great number of graduates have won great honors and awards at national or provincial and ministerial levels.
The graduates trained by CUG Graduate School have exerted important roles in the development of science and technology and the construction of national economy. Since 1978, several have won certificate for “Chinese Doctors with Outstanding Contributions” issued by the diploma-conferring committee of the State Council, and hornors such as“May First”Labor Medals, Hou Dengfeng Prize, and so on. Some of them have become young and middle-aged experts with outstanding contributions, post-doctoral supervisors, pioneers in discipline construction, and leaders in party or governmental organs.
After the development of over fifty years, the structure of graduate disciplines and majors is becoming more and more rational, the conditions are gradually being improved, and the scale of running of the school is enlarging. The school has greatly advanced its education quality, and realized the harmonious development of scales, structure, quality and benefits. In the new century, with the integrated progress of the university as a whole, we strongly believe that the graduate education of our university will keep pace with the times and continuously bring about entirely new prospects for its own development.