Graduation Address: Professor Jo Sharp, School of Geography and Sustainable Development
Tuesday 2 December 2025 – afternoon ceremony
Vice-Chancellor, special guests, colleagues and graduates, it is my great pleasure and honour to add my congratulations to our graduates on this special day.
Looking out at the full hall here – rather different to how it looks at 9am for my first year lectures, I must admit – it is a reminder that your achievements today are not simply those of individuals, but testament to the support of friends and family, class mates, group work collaborators, tutors, lecturers, even those who provide you with much needed coffee in the morning, and perhaps a dram or two at the end of the day. So, while I am primarily here to extend my congratulations to our graduates, may I also say heartfelt thanks to your families and supporters, and friends and staff, who have helped you to this point.
So, what wise words should I send you out of this hall with? The loudest, most insistent voice in my head at this particular moment wants to warn you that imposter syndrome is something that absolutely does not disappear now that you are graduates. I have spent my career being convinced that getting my undergraduate degree, my Masters, my PhD, my lectureship, my professorship… would be the point at which I would suddenly achieve the serenity of confidence.
I’m still waiting.
So, I was reassured when I read the memoir of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and discovered that she too has struggled with imposter syndrome. But, she wrote, rather than seeing this as a problem, she regarded it as her superpower.
When I first read this, it surprised me. But she went on to explain that it was her self-doubt that pushed her to succeed, to ensure that she had done her homework, had covered her brief, had all the information that she might need at her fingertips. Rather than ever feeling she was entitled to be heard, she felt she had to work extra hard to prove her worth.
Working hard to think is not really in vogue. It seems the world is not short of people who are absolutely certain of themselves or their arguments, who do not question their right to be heard. It has led to a world where the loudest, most confident voices have come to dominate, while careful, thoughtful considerations are dismissed. There are increasing pressures for us to ascribe to one side or the other, we are simply told, ‘it is common sense’ to think like this and not like that.
Now, I get very anxious when someone tells me ‘it’s just common sense’. More than 30 years ago, my PhD examined geopolitical representations in the US magazine, Reader’s Digest. The magazine was the epitome of common sense whose very name suggested that its version of events was already digested for the reader, no further reflection was needed. All complexity was reduced to the moral simplicity of right and wrong, true and false, by the experts chosen by the magazine to make sense of the world for its readers.
Sometime later, CNN invited me to write an article about Reader’s Digest for its website. It received a torrent of responses. Everyone says ‘never read below the line’ but I could not resist looking. I was called everything from a communist spy to a CIA plant – quite an achievement in 600 words. But the most common response was: “What is she talking about? The Reader’s Digest was not political! That magazine just printed common sense.”
This form of knowledge production is very different from the kinds of critical knowledge which we explore here at St Andrews, knowledge which seeks always to open up the apparently self-evident to examination, and to expose the commonsensical for its omissions and complications. Your studies here will have made you think hard, to ask: Whose argument is this? What sources have they used? What is revealed by this approach, and what is hidden? In whose interests is this version of events?
The world is complex, messy and difficult to disentangle – but that is the very joy of critical and difficult thinking!
So my hope for you as you walk out of these doors is that you do not see this great celebration today as the end of your education but just as a change in the location of where it happens. Hold onto that critical approach and stay curious. Hold onto the excitement of learning about new things, hearing about different ways to express or be in the world, views that diverge from your own.
So perhaps a little bit of imposter syndrome is not such a bad thing after all if it makes sure we all do our homework.