About the Graduate School

Our Commitment to Academic Excellence

We believe that our voice is best heard through the success of those we train at the highest level to become the academic and professional leaders of tomorrow. To that end, we work in concert with a world-class faculty across a variety of disciplines to mentor and develop our students by engaging them in meaningful research and other professional activities.

The University of Notre Dame is renowned worldwide for academic excellence, and gifted students from around the globe join us to be part of our vibrant intellectual community. As a graduate student at Notre Dame, you will benefit from generous financial support that allows you to focus on your degree objectives and from exposure to and participation in innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary pursuits.

All of this takes place in a setting that is small enough to provide you with individual attention and large enough to provide you with all the tools necessary for your transformation from a student of a chosen discipline to a steward of that discipline—an academic or professional who uses his or her considerable knowledge and skills to enter the arena of public discussion on pressing contemporary issues, to help solve the world’s problems, or to contribute to a greater understanding of our humanity.

A few markers of our academic excellence are:

• Rapid growth in research expenditures— 2008 expenditures are 2.6 times what they were in 1998.

• Our faculty have won more National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships than any other faculty in the country over the last seven years;

• Extremely selective and attractive programs — some matriculate only 9% of applicants and attract 90% of the students to whom they make offers of admission.

• Placement by recent graduates at leading universities such as Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago; and with employers as varied as Boeing, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Eli Lilly and Company, DuPont, General Electric, and the Mobil Oil Company.

About Notre Dame