ABSTRACT
Students may well ask, "What is involved in completing TID work?" "Why should I do this work?" "What will it have to do with my professional and academic competence?" Faculty members, particularly new ones, can be plagued by related questions: "What am I supposed to be conveying to the students whose investigations I direct or on whose committees I serve? What really are the functions served by this phase of graduate study?" "What has this process to do with the purpose of the university?" A core element common to those questions is "Why?" For an answer, we look first at the commonly stated objectives of graduate student research found in institutional publications.
