Graduation address: Professor David Cole-Hamilton
Wednesday 25 June 2014
Vice-Chancellor, honoured guests, Ladies, Gentlemen, colleagues, and especially new graduates and their supporters.
Welcome on this very wonderful occasion. It is a great honour for me to be allowed to address scientists, especially our wonderful Chemistry class who have worked so hard and done so well. A previous Graduation Address was to a class of historians. I was uniquely suited to that task as I failed History ‘O’ Level! To be fair, I have never taken a Biology class in my life, but fortunately we have others here who fully compensate for the deficiency.
Today is a day of great celebration when we think about your careers here and rejoice in your success.
We celebrate your success here today, because YOU are special. Yes, You and You and You – all of you are very special. Special because you have just been awarded a degree from, and I quote, ‘far and away the best university in the world’. And you have been awarded this degree having just celebrated the University’s 600th Anniversary and 200 years of teaching Chemistry in St Andrews. In the 29 years that I have been here, the University has developed from something of sleepy backwater to one of the very best universities in the UK. To use Chemistry as an illustration, in 1985 there were 17 Academic Staff, 3 Postdoctoral Fellow and 18 PhD students. At the low point we graduated 12 students and languished near the bottom of most league tables. Now we have 36 staff, 50 postdoctoral fellows and 180 PhD students. Today we graduate 50 chemists and are in the top three or four in almost all UK league tables. Developments in Biology have been, and Psychology has always been, very highly rated.
This is a defining moment. It brings to an end four or five years of work and study. You may have seen the last time that you will struggle to submit a lab report on time, sit an exam, prepare for a tutorial, or write a dissertation or thesis. Yet, you have done all these things and done them very successfully, so now is the time to celebrate your wonderful achievement.
I hope too, that you have used your time at university well, and have managed to take part in sport, enjoyed different clubs, hill-walked in this beautiful country, enjoyed the beaches; even played golf and perhaps – if you're hardy as well as bright – swum at the East Sands on May Day. While the chemists amongst you will certainly not have had time to sample daytime television or become experts on anagrams and number games as a result of watching Countdown, you may well have met your life partner here – it happens, you know.
Yet bringing these things to an end, today marks the opening of many doors. Some of you will continue in the Academic life, an option that I found so appealing all those years ago that I am still in it and love it. Others of you will continue with chemistry, biology or psychology in industry or research institutes, whilst some of you (I hope only a few) will leave your chosen subject behind for glittering careers in banking or politics (we need a few new minds and approaches in those areas) as captains of industry (St Andrews graduates have led such companies as ICI and Scottish Power) as gifted teachers whom the generations of the future will need, to be able to sit where you are today, or in a whole host of positions, which I hope will be fulfilling and lucrative. Whatever you do, I hope that the last few years will stand you in good stead and will provide the bedrock on which you will build your career, and that you will retain the open-mindedness, vision, compassion and fairness that I hope you have developed during your time here.
Please forgive me, new graduates, if I now spend a few moments talking to your parents and supporters.
I know what it feels like. I have twins, a boy and a girl, who graduated a couple of years ago from Scotland’s second-best university, 50 miles south of here, so I know from first-hand experience what each of you has been through. I have had the ‘phone calls as deadlines approach and panic sets in. I have listened sympathetically as boy or girlfriend troubles have threatened to derail things. I have driven the 50 miles to argue that submitting the essay is in fact a better option than dropping out and I have had calls where the boot is on the other foot, where I have been berated – for example when I was locked out of the residence where I was supposed to be staying during a conference and spent a night on a Park Bench in Nottingham. Finally – yes – I have even had the ‘phone calls which start ‘Daaad?’ and finish with a hole in the bank balance the size of the Marianas Trench. But there were also the great moments of joyful success, good grades, fun relationships and finally very good degrees. I was so proud to rejoice with them in their graduations just as you are today. Thank you for the unfailing support you have given today’s graduates.
So, new graduates, today is a day of great celebration. It is a day to forget the bad times and only remember the great successes. Yet I am sure I speak for every one of my colleagues here on the podium, and those who taught you who cannot be here today, when I say that for us it is also a sad day. We do the most wonderful jobs in the world. We are always surrounded by young people with their fresh and innovative ways of looking at things. You keep us young and keep our minds open and enquiring. Your presence is a great joy to us. Yet the real sadness of this wonderful arrangement is that we just get to know you well and then you leave.
So, I finish with offering the heartiest thanks to all of you for seeing the light and coming to St Andrews, but also a heartfelt request that you never forget St Andrews, that it will always be part of your personal history and that you will manage to come back and see us often over the years. You will always be welcome in the Auld Grey Toon by the sea.
Many congratulations.