Autumn Conferring Ceremonies, 24 October 2012
Autumn Conferrings continue today at UCC and run until Wednesday 31 October 2012 (Picture by: Tom McCarthy)
Autumn Conferrings continue today at UCC and run until Wednesday 31 October 2012 (Picture by: Tom McCarthy)
Students from the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, the College of Medicine and Health, and the College of Science, Engineering and Food Science will graduate with:
College of Arts, Celtic Studies & Social Sciences
College of Medicine & Health
College of Science, Engineering and Food Science
(School of Engineering)
(Department of Chemistry)
The Conferring addresses will be delivered by Dr John Sweeney, retired, School of Nursing and Midwifery, UCC (at 10.00am and 12.30pm) and Jerry O’Sullivan, Managing Director, ESB Networks Ltd. (at 3.30pm).
Further information is available at: http://www.ucc.ie/en/whatson/Name-169260-en.html or see the live stream courtesy of Audio Visual Media Services and the Computer Centre at UCC:http://www.ucc.ie/en/live/
Please note that Adobe Flash is required to play this live stream. Apple's mobile iOS will not be able to play this current stream as it does not support Flash. Please email helpdesk@cc.ucc.ie if you need technical support.
---
Address by Dr John Sweeney, retired, School of Nursing and Midwifery, UCC
President, Heads of Colleges, Faculty and University staff, distinguished guests, family members and most especially to you the graduates of 2012, thank you for inviting me to share your celebration today. It is both an honour and a great pleasure to extend my heartiest congratulations to each of you being conferred today and to your families.
Whether this is an undergraduate or higher degree, it represents the pinnacle of achievement of several years of dedication, study, examinations, and essay writing. For those who have completed undergraduate studies it marks the commencement of a professional career in the social, health or therapeutic disciplines, in which you can be justifiably proud to enter. For those of you who have received a higher award, your expertise and specialist knowledge is being not only being recognised today but it marks an expectation of your potential to contribute further to the praxis and theory base of your discipline.
Today is not only significant in your own lives as you are conferred at UCC but it is also the date when terrestrial television broadcasting changes to the digital signal era. It goes without saying that the information era will challenge us all to develop new ways of communicating with, relating to and empowering the patients, clients and service users if we are to deliver humane, caring and effective services. When I think back to my own conferring from the University of Manchester in 1984, it is salient to recollect that on 24 January of that year the very first Apple Mackintosh computer was launched with a vast memory of 128k and at a cost of $2,500! Less than 30 years ago, there was no email, no internet, no social media sites, no electronic books and no mobile or smart ‘phones. Indeed, many of the disciplines represented here today were taught through professional training courses attached to hospitals, voluntary organisations or local authorities rather than being essential programmes in higher education.
As I reflect on my own career over the past 42 years in the voluntary sector, health services and in higher education, I would like to share three brief insights by way of encouragement. Firstly, change is inevitable and gradual and challenges us every few years to reappraise our skill set, knowledge base and professional know-how since what you have learned here will become obsolete without updating. I did not set out to become a nurse, my original university place was to read European languages but it was in taking a year out in a centre for young people with intellectual disabilities in Berne that, after running a joinery workshop, I decided to alter course.
After moving to Ireland in 2000, rising to three challenges I had to learn a great deal very rapidly about construction as Project Manager (Nursing) for the design and building of a new nursing and midwifery school on the Brookfield Health Sciences Campus. The design and introduction of a new MSc in Nursing helped to hone my teaching, research supervision and curricular expertise. Taking on the leadership of the BSc Nursing Intellectual Disability programme in 2003 required that I go back into practice at COPE Foundation for a day a week and for several weeks across the summer recess to refresh my clinical expertise. Such experiences challenged me to move out of my comfort zone as an academic and also brought greater contact with clinicians, administrative staff and other academics. However, the fact that I took far more time on drug rounds than the other nurses led to comments of ‘degree nurses - all that knowledge but so slow in practice!’
Secondly, who you are and what you bring in addition to what you learn at university, in your career and in your personal and social life is more valuable than we often acknowledge at the time. In any degree programme, you share experiences and learn transferable skills with others in your group, some of whom will remain close friends for life. Certain events, some people and perhaps some of your learning is best forgotten quickly, such as those late nights spent testing research hypotheses as to how much drink is required before you forget where you live, other experiences will remain crystal clear and serve as reminders of your values. These may include things like working in project teams, thinking outside the box to problem solve, supporting each other during times of uncertainty, and expressing your ideas lucidly, coherently and concisely as a graduate. Two years ago when a colleague approached me with an idea to offer a nursing degree programme combined with German language with placements in Germany and theory at UCC, it was my relative fluency in German, experience of working in Europe, curricular expertise and support of the German Department that led a germ of an idea to the development of a new programme.
Such experience of working across disciplinary boundaries between the arts, humanities, sciences and business are invaluable for all our futures. With an interest in art and creative therapies honed during my voluntary work experience in a Camphill community in Switzerland at the outset of my career, I am a strong advocate and contributor to a new initiative called Visual Thinking Strategies. This approach merges the humanities with health sciences and is transforming the way students of all disciplines in the College of Medicine and Health hone their observations skills through seeing, describing and relating the content works of art during gallery visits and in class viewing. This has brought about true interdisciplinary teaching and learning to augment interaction in social and health care settings between practitioners. I commend you then to keep open to new ways of working, studying and researching as you engage with lifelong learning during your career. Florence Nightingale put it this way in a letter to newly qualified nurses on May 23 1873: “For after all, all that any training is to do for us is: to teach us how to train ourselves, how to observe for ourselves, how to think things out for ourselves.”[1]
In retirement I am now, like you, entering a novel and interesting phase of life. Last week I found myself in Italy acting as translator to my brother, a famous shoe designer and manufacturer in a factory near Padua. No knowledge or experience then is ever wasted. May you at the end of your careers look back on a meaningful period of your lives. May you have memories shaped by your own vision, your openness to learning during your career and from the courage and initiative to think beyond the confines of received wisdom and disciplinary boundaries.
Congratulations, enjoy the rest of your day and thanks for listening.
[1] Nightingale, F. (1915) Florence Nightingale To Her Nurses, p.49, MacMillan & Co. Ltd, London.
---
Address by Jerry O’Sullivan, Managing Director, ESB Networks Ltd.
President, Heads of Colleges, Professors, guests and most of all graduates and your proud families, good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to share in your special day.
Firstly I heartily congratulate you, the Engineering and Chemistry graduates of 2012 and your parents, who have guided you, encouraged you and sacrificed for you, to arrive at today - a milestone celebration of your academic achievements.
While 1981 is a long time ago, since I graduated from UCC, I can still remember the graduation day and I hope that it will also be memorable for you when you reminisce in years to come and look back at the class photo in particular and wonder where classmates and friends ended up and how come everyone else now looks so old!!
We live in challenging times and no doubt parents and graduates will be worried about the economy, job prospects and emigration. However, I like to think of the Chinese proverb “may you live in interesting times’’, this is certainly true today, a time of massive technological and business change and at a pace not seen before, I think this presents fantastic opportunities for graduates with your training to take advantage of all aspects of the so called “smart” economy . Also worth remembering that over 22% of the CEO’s in the top 500 companies in the world are from engineering backgrounds, perhaps because their problem solving training can be applied across a very wide range – Also we are here in Cork today, the Pharmaceutical capital -so the omens are good for you.
So how best to position yourself to take full advantage of your excellent education here at UCC and the exciting business opportunities ahead?
Well firstly, I am conscious of the fact that universally young people are not minded to listen to old or correction “older” folk like me, choosing rather to discover for themselves, make their own mistakes and hopefully quickly learning from those mistakes.
Notwithstanding this a few observations based on my own experience.
When I qualified companies hired civil , electrical and other types of engineers and science graduates and tended to “stove piped” them into traditional roles. Nowadays a much more enlightened approach prevails and graduates from a variety of backgrounds are hired for roles, as it is the training, ability to problem solve, knowing how to learn, as well as personality are key. So be confident that you can pursue different streams other than your own immediate discipline and have some fun along the way! I have come across some of the top guys in rating agencies, international banks and business who are Chemists and all manner of academic backgrounds. Our own head of public relations is a Chemist - I think this is great as it brings differing perspectives to business.
Secondly, on-going learning and rotation is critical to broaden your experience and competence. In our company we have over 700 Professional Engineers and 30 Chemists. Within our graduate programmes, we rotate the graduate every 6 months to give a variety of experience in the first 3 years as well as later CPD (continuous professional development) programmes to continually develop the competency of the individual. I highly recommend such programmes and further I would urge you to seek and embrace job rotation on an on-going basis. Even though our innate human reaction is to resist change and remain in our comfort zones, I have rarely come across guys who regret job rotations within or between companies.
Thirdly, mentoring is a great gift and I have benefited greatly from managers and bosses, but most of all field staff along the way, who took time out to mentor, coach and share their experiences with me. Hopefully in time you will also mentor young people, noting that the most important measure of success for a manager is to develop his/her successor
Finally, Scientists, Chemists and Engineers are thought through rigorous science and mathematical analysis that everything is logical, with a correct answer. This is sometimes a challenge when moving into people management where the truth is what the individual believes it to be and as we all know relationships are complex, not logical and not straight forward. In my days in UCC we had effectively no lectures on management styles, team motivation, employee relations and so on, so hopefully this has changed nowadays. This aspect is very important and as an example, when we survey our clients across third eight countries as to why they give repeat business to ESB they say the quality of your people and specifically their ability to work successfully in multi-functional teams and maintain long term relationships with clients So we place a huge importance on this in our company and so do other companies - the ability of the graduate to be a team player and to value all team members and their contribution
So with those few musings on board, I return to my opening comments that I believe there are excellent opportunities unfolding for the engineering, chemistry and general science graduates of today, given the very rapid technological explosion. In ESB Network for example, the convergence of traditional electricity infrastructure with IT and telecoms to form the smart networks of the future, has catapulted us to be a major internationally research organisation to overcome the huge technical and business challenges involved. ESB Networks is now ranked the third most advanced utility in the world, and we are now selling our competence internationally. This has been instrumental in IBM bringing their latest research lab to Ireland employing 250 graduates, similarly with INTEL, SAP, Google and companies of that stature, see Ireland as the place to be
A further positive note is the improving international sentiment towards Ireland. Last year, in ESB we did not succeed in raising funds on the international bond markets to invest in our business, because of contagion from sovereign issues and from a negative international view of Ireland Inc.I am glad to report that recently we did raise significant funds and it is very evident to me from visiting US and European capitals on this fundraising trip, that the sentiment towards Ireland has improved greatly.
So I will conclude on those positive notes and I wish you every success on your journey whether it is further study or into the business world
Thank you and I hope you enjoy the remainder of your special day.