Graduation address: Tuesday 14 June morning ceremony

Graduation address by Dr Eoin Jordan, International Education Institute

Vice-Chancellor, colleagues, graduates and special guests. 

I would like to start my address by offering my heartfelt congratulations to those of you who have graduated this morning from the Schools of English, Mathematics and Statistics, and from the International Education Institute. It is an honour to speak to you and your loved ones today, and I hope this ceremony will provide you with the sense of accomplishment and achievement that you deserve after the hard work each of you has put into your studies, whether these were focused on Scottish literature, statistical ecology, or second language acquisition.

We are gathered here today to celebrate graduates from different backgrounds, who studied at different levels, and also via different modes of learning. Many of you will have experienced at least a component of online teaching as a result of the coronavirus pandemic; however, one cohort of today’s graduates in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) studied both intentionally and entirely by distance learning, often alongside full-time work and family commitments. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the central place that our distance-learning students occupy, alongside those of you who studied in person, within our diverse University community.

As is traditional in a graduation address, as well as telling you how fantastic you are and how hard you have worked, I will now attempt to offer some, hopefully useful, advice for the future.

In addition to reflecting on my own experiences, I thought it would be beneficial to distil the essence of all the advice offered to previous cohorts of graduates over the past four years. With this in mind, I created a small corpus of the 26 graduation addresses that have been delivered at St Andrews since 2018. A linguistic analysis of this yielded a few useful pointers, which I will convey to you now with some additional commentary from me.

Firstly, the word “celebrate” occurred 16 times within my corpus, and “achievement” occurred 20 times. Given the significance of your achievement in graduating today, it is of great importance that you take the opportunity to celebrate extensively, and to reward yourself for your hard work. Graduating from university is not a regular event in most people’s lives, so please make sure to enjoy the experience fully, and not just tick it off your list as a task completed.

The word “proud” occurred 25 times, often being used to indicate that as a graduate, you should be proud of yourself and your achievements. This is good advice. I would encourage you to view your graduation from St Andrews, a world-leading university, as evidence of your own abilities. While this pride should not lead you to underestimate the abilities of others, I hope that it will instil the confidence in you to meet the challenges that your future life may present. In addition, you should feel proud of the wider St Andrews community, of which you are a member, and the positive impact that this community has on the world in areas as diverse as energy innovation, diplomacy, medicine, and cultural understanding.

When searching for commonly occurring phrases in the corpus, there were also some patterns. While not as frequent as the single-word matches, the phrase “make this world a better place” appeared several times. I would encourage you to take this on as your overarching goal for the future. I am sure that those of you graduating today will follow a variety of different paths, but I hope that in your separate pursuits you will do your best to ensure that the impact you have on the world around you is a positive one.

One final repeated phrase that I noted in the addresses was “take a moment to reflect”. This too is great advice. Taking time to reflect on who you are, what you have done, and who and what you could be and do in the future will help you live a life that is aligned with your core values. I suggest that moments of reflection should be repeated on a regular basis, rather than being a one-off event, to allow you to learn from your experiences, and to integrate this learning into who you are.

So, in summary: celebrate, be proud of yourself and the St Andrews community, aim for a positive impact on the world, and reflect regularly. Congratulations once again on this special day.