Happy New Year and welcome back to campus! I hope all of you had some opportunity to get a break and are now ready to get back to your studies and research. May 2011 be a productive time in your personal and professional development. Let am take this opportunity to welcome two new students to the ESE program: Peter Caldwell (recent graduate from Landscape Architecture at Purdue) and Rita Jaramillo (an ME graduate from Columbia), whom some of you met at the Oct. 2010 ESE Symposium. Welcome to both of you! I also want to keep you abreast of what we are doing in the ESE Colloquium (Tuesdays @ 3:30 in 2-425 Lilly Hall) for those of you who did not attend last semester or serve as a Peer-to-Peer Mentor for the Fall 2010 class. We invite you attend as you can or to fully participate by enrolling. We will be reading from the book The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. According to Ridley, "Rational Optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis because the way that markets in goods, services, and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialize honestly for the betterment of all" and that the world now is "richer, healthier, and kinder too, as much because of commerce as despite it." We will read & discuss several chapters from this book, and supplement that with related material from other sources, during the first 8 weeks of the semester. Perhaps we will find his optimism is justifiable and contagious, or maybe we will find some sort of middle ground (based on pragmatism). Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions as you move forward in your graduate program. Linda S. Lee Ecological Science & Engineering Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, Program Head http://www.purdue.edu/dp/ese/ Professor, Environmental Chemistry, http://www.agry.purdue.edu/staffbio/lslbio.htm Purdue University, Department of Agronomy Crop Soil & Environmental Sciences 915 W. State Street, 3-363 Lilly Hall West Lafayette, IN 47907-2054 Office: (765) 494-8612; Fax (765) 496-2926