I am truly honoured and humbled to have this opportunity to speak to, and for you, today through this valediction.
While today is indeed a celebration of our achievements, commencement is also proud moment for the family of those, who like me, are first generation graduates. More importantly, commencement is also an opportune moment for us to individually reflect on our time in NUS and to look forward to our future.
Please indulge me and allow me to share the 3 things that my personal reflection has brought to mind.
The Unsung Role of Luck
First, I want to talk about luck. We don’t usually think of life this way, but we are all actually immensely lucky.
We would very much like to attribute our success in university solely to our own abilities and hard work but those are often only part of the equation. We erroneously discount the importance of luck in our lives.
We are lucky to be born and raised in a time of relative peace and an era of prosperity, which frees us to pursue higher education. The world was not always that way. We are lucky to live in a country that values quality higher education and makes it affordable for its people. During our time as students, we were lucky to have been challenged and guided by top professors in what must be one of the world’s fastest rising universities. Closer to our hearts, we were also lucky to have had the friendship and support of our friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, and peers through our journey in university.
Most of you are luckier than me in one aspect – to have your parents support you through all your challenges in NUS. My mom and dad would have wanted to be here with me today but it will always be a great regret that they will never get to see me graduate. Sadly, they passed away before I started university. I hope they are proud of me and I will always be guided by their words and teachings.
I know what life is without parents. So believe me when I say that we should never discount the importance of our parents or ever take them for granted. It means so much to them what is so little to us. I urge you to take your parents out for a good dinner with your first pay cheques.
I invite you to join me now in a round of applause to express our heartfelt gratitude to them.
The Role of Knowledge
This brings me to my second point. Let me talk about knowledge. When I speak of knowledge, I refer to acquired skills rather than the accumulation of factual information. Factual information will eventually be forgotten but acquire skills stay with us.
There will be a good number of us not be practising as engineers. Some of us will educate, some of us will join the financial sector, some of us will be entrepreneurs, and then some of us will be in public service. That is the reality and that speaks to the quality and versatility of one of the best chemical engineering programmes in the world today.
We now can ask questions, explore possibilities, and seek for creative solutions. Our education has embedded deep within us a systems level of engineering knowledge, thinking, and analysis that is now second nature to us.
The best example of that is the diverse set of proposals we generated for the design project. In less than 3 months, we went from having no knowledge of the Cumene-to-Phenol process to becoming basic technical consultants.
The world has grown increasingly complex but our critical and systems thinking will enable us to venture beyond the fog to see the bigger picture. I am confident that our acquired knowledge will most definitely serve us well whatever our future careers.
Our Shared Responsibility to Society
Let me now move on to my third and final point. Having been lucky enough to go to and do well in university, and now becoming freshly minted graduates brimming with knowledge, we have a responsibility to society.
I speak of responsibility both in terms of our roles as future employees and in reference to our memberships in society.
This is what I mean: As employees, I’m optimistic that we will use our education and knowledge well. I am sure the petrochemical engineers in our midst will have the professional ethics to speak out in times of safety and environmental lapses to help our employers enhance their operations. I am certain the pharmaceutical researchers amongst us will have the moral courage to speak out when internal testing procedures would benefit from improvement. I am sure the educators in this group will mentor and develop our future generations to the best of their ability to help them achieve their dreams. Above all, I am certain that whatever our future profession, we give our very best.
Moreover, as members of society, we also have a responsibility to those who were not as lucky as us. By a stroke of luck, their paths in life were more arduous. We most definitely can and should help the less fortunate. There will be times when we may be tempted to turn a blind eye, or delude ourselves that its someone else’s problem, or convince ourselves that our time is scarce to justify inaction. But I am convinced and optimistic we will use our education to overcome those temptations.
My optimism is not misplaced. We have consistently shown our willingness to give our time and money for worthy causes.
I am especially heartened by the success of Project Cheway, a community initiative to Cambodia, which was started by members of this very graduating cohort sitting in the audience today. The 2 groups of chemical engineers that travelled to Cambodia in 2012 and 2013 have resisted temptation and found time in the midst of our academic pursuits to help the less fortunate. The rest of us can too.
I am also happy to report numerous positive responses to my personal call for donations to NUS Giving to secure the financial futures of our chemical engineering juniors. All these prove that we are indeed a caring group of engineers and that we will diligently discharge our responsibilities to society.
All in all, my personal reflection leads me to this conclusion: Education has granted us the knowledge and ability to do many things, but empathy will grant us the wisdom to do meaningful things in service of others, well beyond what is asked of us.
My friends, we are chemical engineers first, but members of society always.