Graduation Address: Professor Sascha Hooker, School of Biology
Wednesday 12 June 2024 – morning ceremony
Vice-Chancellor, special guests, colleagues, and graduates…
Let me start by congratulating you all – to the graduates here today, and to your families and friends, celebrating here with you or watching online, for all their support helping you get to this moment. This is a wonderful achievement, and you should all be rightly proud of yourselves. You have earned your degrees.
I am honoured to have been asked to give this graduation address for the Schools of Biology and Art History. Unfortunately, I cannot claim to know all that much about Art History. However, I do think that Biology and Art make complementary partners.
You only have to look in our own Bell Pettigrew Museum here in St Andrews to see this. Described by David Attenborough as “packed full of treasures and wonders”, this museum of natural history also provided a night-class venue for budding artists when I first came to St Andrews.
The museum was named after James Bell Pettigrew whose magnum opus was entitled Design in Nature – which spans these two subjects well. The museum does the same, showcasing both some amazing and beautiful biological collections and also some wonderful artwork based on material in those collections. If any of you have spent your time here without visiting this museum – I highly recommend that you do, and that you take your families along too.
In fact-checking for this address, I was amazed to discover that James Bell Pettigrew, in addition to being a noted naturalist and museum curator, also had a passion for investigating flight. In fact, in 1903, shortly before the Wright brothers made their historic first flights, the 70-year-old Pettigrew had his own petrol engine-driven aeroplane built. He managed to fly it too, albeit for only 60 feet, down a street in St Andrews before it crashed, breaking his femur in the process. But how fantastic is this – that we had an early flight here in St Andrews! I hope that St Andrews has inspired this kind of passion in you – not only bestowing you with your degrees but encouraging you to take on new challenges.
Speaking of challenges, I recently read an article from William Shatner, who depending on your age – you may be more likely to know from his adaptation of the Pulp song Common People than as the first commander of the Starship Enterprise. Anyway, remarkably, at the youthful age of 90, he recently went into space. Having expected to feel a deep connection with the immensity of space, he wrote afterwards instead of the deepest grief he had ever experienced. He discovered that the beauty of our universe is not out there in the vastness of space, it is down here, with all of us. He says he understood, in the clearest possible way, that we live on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. Earth is, and will stay, our only home.
To both the biologists and the art historians here, I think this will be the greatest challenge of your time – getting the world to recognise the sustainability crisis and to work to keep our planet habitable, recover imperilled ecosystems, and retain the glorious wild places we still have.
Graduating from the University of St Andrews in your respective degrees has, I hope, given you many of the tools you are going to need. Life will throw challenges and curveballs, but I hope your education here has given you resilience, the ability to overcome adversity, the capacity not to fear failure and the fortitude to take calculated risks.
So, what pearls of wisdom can I leave you with today? I have seven:
- Believe in yourselves. Be the change you want to see. Seize opportunities that present themselves to you. Remember, you will never regret things you tried which did not succeed, but you are very likely to regret things you did not try.
- A huge amount of life is luck, both good and bad. I think back to my own undergraduate cohort, and just how many of us have faced difficulties over the years. I had no concept of this when I was your age – both because many disabilities are hidden but also because many disabilities hide the people who have them. All you can do is to play the hand you get to the best of your ability. On this note…
- Climbing out of a deep hole is just as much of an achievement as climbing a huge mountain. Here in St Andrews, we are increasingly recognising the unequal nature of the playing field and embracing initiatives to improve equity. Gender has been the canary in the coalmine in examining our practices, and has spearheaded concerns about other inequalities, with race and disability following suit. I am hugely optimistic about the more equal and kind society that your generation will develop.
- You do not need to do it all alone. There will be times when you take on big challenges and it can all seem overwhelming. The best advice I was given many years ago was that being a good leader simply meant asking your team what they think, listening to them and then choosing your favourite option. This worked when I first skippered a research sailboat, and I have run teams this way ever since.
- Practise, practise, practise. They say it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something! … So, make sure you enjoy what you do!
- Just do your best. In this age of social media – it is so easy to feel overwhelmed. Just be the best version of you and try not to compare yourself to others.
- Celebrate differences and be happy to be unique. As a last quote for you – we recently saw the musical Hamilton on tour in Edinburgh. Not big theatregoers, I was blown away. The line that perhaps left the biggest impression was: “I am the one thing in life I can control, I am inimitable, I am an original.”Do not allow yourselves to be victims of external forces. Try to be proactive rather than reactive and just focus on the things that you can control. You are each of you exceptional and incomparable.
So, Class of 2024 – You’ve got this! Get out there and be your best inimitable selves!
Thank you.