Dean’s Welcoming Speech
TY Wong Hall
Ho Sin Hang Engineering Building
1 September 2014
Fellow students:
It is my great pleasure to welcome you all in the Faculty welcome reception. First of all, congratulations! Congratulate on entering CUHK, a top and comprehensive University in Hong Kong, congratulate on entering our faculty, where you can achieve your highest potential.
Today is your first day in University, which is also one of the most special and remarkable times in your life. University presents a fascinating life ahead. There is a vast array of courses that you can enroll, there are abundant student societies that you can join and there are a lot of college activities that await your participation. To a freshman like you, everything is new, everything is interesting. Some of you may feel very excited while some of you may feel overwhelmed. To maximize time use, you’d better plan your schedule before school starts. Better still, spend some time to set your goals and spend some time to plan for the coming years, think about what you want to achieve in these few years. After all, four years are really short. Set your goals high and never underestimate your capability.
Good time management and self-motivation are keys to success. Although participating in student and college activities is a good experience, you have to spend your time wisely. Strike a balance between studying and socializing. Do not spend too much time in those activities and neglect your studies. It is perhaps tempting to enjoy the moment and to have fun with friends, rather than working hard on your studies. But if you work hard enough, you will find engineering is actually much more interesting than the society activities. More importantly, success does not come without hard work and the few years at university go very quickly. If you do NOT want to end up being mediocre, study hard. If you want to have a fruitful university life, study hard. If you want to have a rewarding career, study hard.
As I said, although our engineering programmes are challenging, they are also very rewarding. You can make a world of difference with your engineering skills. Let us have a look at the NAE Grand Challenges for the 21st century and you will get a glimpse of what great things you can achieve when you become an engineer.
However, before you can solve the grand challenges, you have to deal with the basics first. In order to grasp the advanced physics, math, biology, chemistry, IT, etc. that are consisted in our programmes, you have to spend time to study, reflect and think. It is important to build a solid understanding of all the fundamentals. Do not just memorize your lecture notes. Be more serious at class and ask more critical questions. Our teachers aim at inspiring you to think and find out the solutions by yourselves instead of just bombarding you with text book materials. Please do ask them questions when you don’t understand any of your lecture materials. They are there to help.
Besides learning the fundamentals, it is also very important to do undergraduate research. It trains you to be innovative and independent. The Faculty has an Undergraduate Summer Research Internship Programme that you should take advantage of. Prof. Michael Cheng will introduce this programme later.
Some of you get very good entrance grades in secondary school whereas some of you may not. But entrance grade is really not that important. We are here to have a fresh start. Another key to success is to work hard and work smart. Hard work bears fruits and those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. Do not give up easily when you find the courses difficult. When you run into problems, make sure you get proper help as soon as possible. Each of you has been assigned an adviser. Do contact them when you have problems. All our tutors and professors are willing and ready to help. If there are difficulties too great that your advisers can’t solve, you may find your department chairman, the associate deans or me. I’ll introduce them later.
You are lucky that CUHK is a comprehensive University, which offers courses from a lot of different fields. You are encouraged to broaden your views by taking elective courses, such as humanities, philosophy, etc. while focusing on your engineering and science core courses or electives. You are also encouraged to take part in the work- study or exchange programmes or undergraduate research that our faculty offers. All these would help develop your skills and raise your competitiveness.
Last but not least, I would like to share a meaningful Chinese proverb with you from <禮記.中庸>: 博學之, 審問之, 慎思之, 明辨之, 篤行之, which means to learn from a variety of places, to ask until you satisfy your desire to learn, to reflect meticulously, to distinguish clearly and to manifest that things you have learnt.
I hope all of you will graduate with flying colours and become an engineer with deep and broad knowledge. Remember to work hard and aim high. Never underestimate your own ability and go for your passion. | |
