It’s thesis show season — that exciting but anxious time when young artists unveil what they’ve produced in two years of art school and prepare to be launched into the world.

As it happens, the Columbia University School of the Arts 2008 MFA thesis exhibition, which opens Sunday at the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, is a kind of coming-out not just for the graduating students but for the school’s new dean, Carol Becker.

Ms. Becker, who was previously the dean of faculty and senior vice president for academic affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has big plans for what she’d like to do at Columbia, including building a higher profile within the university for the School of the Arts, which also includes programs in film, theater, and writing, and sparking more interaction between the university’s scholars and its artists.

“Columbia already has … the intellectual strength,” Ms. Becker said in a recent interview. But, she added, even those students and professors who theorize about art, literature, and film rarely take advantage of their proximity to living practitioners in those fields.

“The university is very divided by disciplines,” she said. “A lot of people at Columbia don’t even know there’s a School of the Arts.”

She has initiated conversations with the graduate schools of architecture and journalism about possible way their students can collaborate. And her interest in discussions across disciplines is already apparent in two events planned around the thesis show. On May 6, the director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, George Lewis, will lead a conversation at the Fisher Landau Center among three artists, Arthur Jafa, Amy Sillman, and Marina Rosenfeld, about their use of improvisation.

On May 15, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks will give a talk about the relationship between art and science.

One subject that often comes up around art schools is how much these schools should prepare students for the market.

“You’re always on this tightrope of wanting to make the connections for them, but not wanting it to happen so quickly that it eclipses the creative process,” Ms. Becker said. “That’s the negotiation that an art school is doing all the time, particularly in New York, where the art market is the biggest. There’s no illusion [for students in New York] about what the next step is; the next step is you have to secure a place to show your work.”

Some educators worry that group thesis exhibitions end up as functioning as showcases for dealers. That is one reason that the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts doesn’t do an end-of-year group show, the dean, Thomas Lawson, said. Instead, each graduating student gets a solo show somewhere on campus during their last semester. (The students do organize their own end-of-year group show, but it is off campus, usually in a donated space in Los Angeles.)

“We privilege the notion of their individual shows as the crucial thing,” Mr. Lawson said.

The director of the Yale University School of Art, Robert Storr, said what he really doesn’t want is “dealers scouting people while they’re here — though I know it happens.”

Getting picked up by a dealer changes a student’s relationship to other students and even to the faculty, he said. “The important thing [about graduate school] is you will get much franker, tougher criticism here than you will get in the wider world. [But] if there’s a third party that has a checkbook in the middle of that, then it distorts it.”

“One of the things art school should teach students is to read carefully the biographies of the artists they admire,” to see how different their paths have been, Mr. Storr said. He cited Thomas Nozkowski, who for many years didn’t have gallery representation.

Now, in his 50s, he has been picked up by PaceWildenstein, where his latest show received rave reviews. “He’s probably closer to the reality for a lot of other people coming out of school than Jeff Koons,” Mr. Storr said.

Ms. Becker, for her part, said that one of the important jobs of an art school is to help students “develop a body of knowledge and conceptual ideas that will sustain them through the course of their lives as thinkers — because artists are also thinkers.”

“They’re all going into debt,” she acknowledged. “But they’re learning to place the bar very high by being around people” who are working at a high level. “You learn what’s really extraordinary work by being around extraordinary people,” she said.

In addition to the MFA art show, which runs from Sunday until May 25, there are thesis readings for the Writing Division, Friday and Saturday evening, and a New Voices, New Plays Festival on Monday at the DR2 Theatre in Union Square.

On May 8, there will be a “Faculty Selects” screening of outstanding thesis films at Town Hall.