Graduation address: Professor Dan Clayton, School of Geography and Sustainable Development
Friday 4 July 2025 – morning ceremony
Vice-Chancellor, special guests, colleagues and, most importantly, our marvellous graduates, many congratulations to you on your achievement, and many thanks to your families and supporters, and friends and staff, who have helped you to this point. I hope you have a magical day and am always as amazed as I am relieved to see you navigate this stage, in such finery, without any trips or spills.
It is my privilege and pleasure to offer these few words of reflection on your success, and my inclination as a geographer is to ask you to consider the importance of place – in our case St Andrews – to how we lead our lives, and to how our stories, journeys and bonds are made. As stuck out on a blustery edge of the North Sea as St Andrews is, it is, I think, a special place to study, and you, our students, are vital to making it so.
Places are unique and have an inner identity (what happens in St Andrews stays in St Andrews, you might say!), although they are also made up of connections with other places and never wholly self-contained. Furthermore, while you are here for yourselves and your own futures, you have also been part of a community. Your student stories, like mine from many moons ago, will link you to others, and here to elsewhere, through a mix of work and play, focus and debate, determination and experimentation, some chance encounters and near misses, and some letdowns as well as successes.
Your years at St Andrews have been shaped by what geographers would describe as different ‘elements of place’. I’m thinking here about specifics of how and where in the town you have studied and lived, and how and where you have interacted with others – different study spaces and classroom settings; your halls, flats and rooms, sports and social clubs; cafés, shops, bars and beaches; of course your student union; and with a fair amount of journeying between here and home, and on myriad adventures, such as field trips in our School. These particulars matter. Your stories and memories are bound up with them.
What we might describes as the ‘psychology of place’ also matters. It was the kindness of strangers, of my student peers, in an unfamiliar place that hit me first when I started university as a shy 18-year-old, and such kindness is, I think, one of the things that defines St Andrews. And my overriding feeling upon graduating, and perhaps yours too, was to be thankful: thankful for the time and opportunity, for the space in which I could grow as a student and person, for being picked back up when I wobbled, and for all I learnt.
When you started out, in September 2021, the world and this University was still inching its way out of the Covid-19 pandemic, and lives and studies were still somewhat curtailed. We have come a long way since and you are leaving St Andrews today with a whole lot more than just a degree hood and a scroll.
You have found your voice and discovered new things about yourself and how to care for others. You have learned how to wear a red gown in funny ways, on and off the shoulder, and so forth, which bodes well for the fashion industry. You have tested yourself, often to your limits, and been quite surprised and pleased, I should imagine, at what you’ve found when you did.
Against the self-interest and division abroad in the world today, you have found and upheld values of community. Your stories will not just be about hard graft and academic attainment, with moments of doubt and struggle along the way, for sure, but also about friendship and fraternity and about finding your voice.
Your university days will have spawned some lifelong friendships, and St Andrews is notorious – about 17% notorious, I gather – for some of them becoming your spouses.
You have learned how to make the most of challenging circumstances and done so with politeness and creativity. Let me take you back to the tailend of Covid, your first year, when I would end my Friday 2pm to 5pm online class with what I called a ‘quarantini’: we’d pause proceedings at 4.30pm for students to retrieve a drink of their choice and return for a chat about how we were all doing. The quarantinis were educational achievements in their own right, decorated with bits fruit and veg, and with names, such as the Kale Kite and Blueberry Bat, that should really be patented.
One Friday I enquired after a student with a murky brown drink in a very elegant looking cocktail glass. “That’s a vodka and marmite,” she submitted, sounding somewhat flat. “Well,” she continued, “I’ve got Covid. I don’t feel too bad, but I can’t taste anything, I can’t smell anything, and I absolutely detest marmite, so I thought why not.” And she downed it in one, of course to rapturous applause!
You have found, done and become all these things – and more.
To conclude, be proud of what you have achieved. Hearty congratulations. We thank you for all you have brought to our community. And, before you leave, take a final look around the place you have made home, where you have made your student stories and memories, and then think about the kind of places you want to be in, and make, and fight for, in the future.