The Duke Graduate School is home to approximately 2,500 PhD students and 700 research master’s degree students, who are enrolled across more than 80 departments and programs and working with more than 1,300 graduate faculty members. The small, private settings in our departments and programs help graduate students and faculty build a special partnership marked by intimate collegiality and common purpose. The hallmark of graduate education at Duke is a rich blend of deep, specialized knowledge in a field of study, intersecting with the frontiers of other fields. Multidisciplinary approaches are considered key to discovery and the production of knowledge. Collaborative research and study groups of faculty and graduate students coalesce around problems and themes in many university settings that extend beyond the boundaries of individual departments and programs. The overall mission of The Graduate School is to provide research-based graduate training that will help students learn the analytical skills to be future leaders in a wide variety of professions. The Graduate School serves several other roles as well: -- Provide quality control for all aspects of graduate education at Duke. -- Improve the quality of our programs through a variety of mechanisms, including providing funds to recruit the best and most diverse students, conducting regular reviews of programs, and giving special attention to the promotion of diversity and intellectual collegiality in each of our programs. -- Serve as the primary advocate for the need of graduate students to be students, so that any service roles they may serve in the university to obtain financial support will be treated as secondary to their need to have time and adequate resources to engage in graduate study. -- Play an active role in supporting all aspects of graduate student life, including those that are not precisely academic in nature.