1913: Number of students who enroll in the Graduate School’s founding class: 13
Courtesy of University Archives
1920: Tuition, per semester. The registration fee ran another $15, and it cost $10 to receive a diploma.
1920: Chunjen Constant Chen, the first international graduate student, receives a master of science degree in agriculture.
Courtesy of University Archives
1925: 350,000 pounds of butter that dairy husbandry student N.N. Nicholas helped manufacture for the U.S. Navy.
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1931: Daisy Inez Purdy is the first woman to earn a Ph.D., with the dissertation “A Study of the Bacteriological Changes Produced During the Aging of Cured Hams.”
Courtesy of University Archives
1941: First Ph.D. recipient Charles Sando (1920) preserves bugs, ears of corn and butterflies in resin at a U.S. Department of Commerce exhibit on plastics.
Courtesy of EverythingInsects.com
1950: Parren J. Mitchellis the first full-time, on-campus African-American grad student, finishing a master’s degree in sociology with honors in 1952. He became the first African American elected to Congress from Maryland in 1971.
Courtesy of University Archives.
1950: Cost of graduate student tuition per credit hour. Lab fees ranged from $1 to $10.
1966: 320% Enrollment increase from 1956, to 8,000 students, at the height of the Vietnam War draft.
Courtesy of University Arcrchives
1971: History graduate assistant Jim Auerbach, with the help of Marilynn Terry, Charles Errico and Ross Kimmel, introduces audio-visual aids into the classroom.
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1977: “The Effect of White Noise on Short- and Long-Term Recall in Hyperactive Boys”—dissertation title.
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1980: Percent of students are age 30 or over; in 1975, only 38.9 percent of grad students were over 30.
1986: Judith Resnick Ph.D. ’77 dies aboard the space shuttle Challenger. She received her degree in electrical engineering and was the second American woman to orbit the Earth.
Courtesy of University Archives
2002: D.J. Patil M.A ’99, Ph.D. ’01 and others build a scientific digital library for Iraq. In 2005, the White House names him the first U.S. chief data scientist.
2003: Doctoral dissertations are submitted digitally rather than on paper.
2018: “Active Attention for Target Detection and Recognition in Robot Vision”— dissertation title.
