Graduation address: Dr Colva Roney-Dougal

Wednesday 25 June 2014

Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen.

To all of our new graduates: congratulations! We are here today to celebrate a great moment in your lives. I am sure that the day is passing in a whirl of photographs, repeated attempts to keep your gowns and hoods hanging properly, and slightly rushed family lunches before this ceremony, but I do hope that you are finding the time to feel real pride in yourselves for what you have achieved during your time here at St Andrews.

One of the most important tasks of a graduation address – apart from keeping strictly to five minutes or less – is to offer thanks. My first thanks go to you, the students. The University would literally not exist without you! I became an academic expecting to far prefer research to teaching, and was surprised to find just how much fun it is to lecture here; your enthusiasm and humour have lightened many a grey St Andrews winter day for me.

I want to offer a warm welcome to the family and friends of those graduating today, and to thank you too, for giving so much support, both emotional and financial, during these four years of rapid personal and intellectual development. For some of you, this will be your first time here in St Andrews, and I do hope that having made the trip, you will take the time to explore this beautiful town.

St Andrews is an unusual place, a small town huddled on rocks in the middle of nowhere, but in possession of a castle (ruined), cathedral (ruined), university (very much not ruined) and a great many well-tended golf courses. The town is said to have gained its name over 1600 years ago, when St Regulus was tasked with taking the bones of St Andrew from Patna, in Greece, to the ends of the earth, for safekeeping. After travelling for many months, he was shipwrecked here, and decided that it was a good enough approximation!

There is something about the isolation of this place that lends a very special quality to the friendships that are made here, and I am confident that most of you new graduates will still be in touch with the majority of your university friends, even twenty years from now. I am a St Andrews graduate myself, and during my PhD and postdoc years away from here, I was repeatedly struck by how close my circle of St Andrean friends remained, and how easily our friendships were rekindled, even after years of not seeing one another. I think this might have something to do with the fact that for the four years of our student friendship there was an almost total lack of opportunities to escape each other!

But of course you have been here not just to make friends, but also to learn. So let me ask: what is the point of the degree that you have just earned? What will the earning of it have done for you? For some of you, the academic content of the degree itself will be important – you will be going out in the world to use your skills in computer science, in physics, in astronomy, in geography and the geosciences. But for many of you, your future career will not use these specific skills at all. So why have you bothered? What have you gained? I want to single out two things amongst many.

The first is that I hope that we have succeeded in developing and encouraging your sense of curiosity. Whilst here you have learnt the importance not just of learning answers, but also of asking questions. Googling ideas for this speech – another skill that many of you will have learnt – I found a lovely quotation, from Arnold Edinborough: ‘If you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly’. I hope that you have also developed the confidence to actually ask your questions, loudly and publically if need be. If you have thought about something, and realised that you don't know the answer, then it is not a stupid question. Finally, having asked a question, one needs judgement to find the truth amongst many conflicting answers, and humility to recognise when the true answer is not the one to our taste.

The second thing that I am confident that you will have gained, as you have worked towards deadlines, chosen modules and maybe even switched degrees, managed budgets and drinking and laundry (or failed to manage them), is a deeper understanding of who you truly are, of what interests you and of what makes you happy in the world. With any luck you now have the beginnings of an understanding – for such knowledge is never complete – of what it will take for you to feel fulfilled in life. Aristotle said ‘Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all’, and I hope that the experiences that you have had here and the choices that you have made have educated your heart to prepare you for life as you leave the fixed tramlines of formal education. 

In my third year here as an undergraduate, the Pulp song Disco 2000 was in the charts. My boyfriend has advised me not to attempt to sing to you, so I shall just report that the chorus suggests ‘Let's all meet up in the year 2000… Be there at two o'clock by the fountain down the road’. My friends and I vowed that we would come back in the year 2000 and meet up at the (sadly dry) fountain in the middle of Market Street, which some years later we duly did. Please do make your own vows with your friends today to come back and visit us here again. You will always be welcome.

Good luck, congratulations, and enjoy the rest of your day.