Faculty Of Science Address
FYI: This is an old post from an old blog I kept in uni
I recently had the honour of giving the Address of the Faculty Scholar at our annual Faculty of Science awards night. I’ll admit I was petrified for days (weeks, even) leading up to the event, unsure of what message I thought was most important to get across. I settled on the below. Enjoy. Don’t judge (too hard).
Good evening Dean, academic and professional staff, guests, and most importantly, students.
What I want to talk to you about tonight is strictly speaking not on science. It’s rather about making science better, about stories and diversity.
You see, I entered Sydney University with no intention of studying science, a head filled with visions of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and the deepest conviction that I was going to become a desk-stomping, poetry-reciting English teacher.
A child of the foster system, I know from a great deal of personal experience the power of strong mentorship and stability. I have been lucky to have these in brilliant foster parents and teachers throughout most of my life. My motivation was simple: I was going to change the world by changing worlds, just as mine had been.
I was wrong. This became very clear to me when, at a welcome afternoon tea a little way in, I found myself complaining about my degree in exquisite detail to a lovely blonde lady who seemed altogether too interested in my input. A few minutes later, she introduced herself to the group as none other than our esteemed Chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, and I promptly decided to change my course.
I’ve changed degrees twice, overall, and majors uncountably many times. I’ve dabbled in English and neuroscience and Arabic, and always come home to chemistry. I’m not telling you all this so that I come across as delightfully capricious or approachable or comfortably abject. The fact is that I am not yet very old, though I certainly feel it sometimes, and I am frankly not sure I have much to offer you by way of sage wisdom.
All I have are stories like this, and some that are a little more serious.
But stories have been more than enough for me in mentoring and leadership. See, stories have the most remarkable, sometimes dangerous, power of taking on their own lives while also shaping the world around us. Fiction is an amazing thing, but as scientists we have an incredible tool in our individual stories to encourage genuine change in our fields.
Your own narrative is a path carved through your own experience; it contains an abundance of data on what to do, what not to do, how to do it. This is why it’s important that I tell you tonight that I was fostered: in the UK, while 50% of the general population will make it to university, only 6% of people with experience in care will. I would not have made it here without incredible mentors and support and, importantly, a brother who part-carved the path before me. His story, always a step ahead of but similar to mine, brought the possibility of university to life for me: he was the only other person I knew with a similar background who had taken this step. In many ways, his story made mine possible. When you can look ahead and see someone, seeing yourself in the 6% becomes more conceivable. Their path makes yours clearer, realer.
As science-doers, we can be hesitant to tell our individual stories: our work must stand on its own, we are often terrified of showing weakness or admitting failure, we are deeply concerned with fitting in and keeping up in a field mired in tradition but changing increasingly rapidly. This is important now more than ever: not only can our stories pave the way for greater diversity, they can help to rebuild trust in the public eye. We have a moral imperative to tackle the groundswell of anti-intellectualism that is wreaking havoc on our climate and our health. Being emphatically diverse encourages trust and empathy. It’s not a nicety, it’s a necessity.
So this is it: students, you are in the process of writing a story that will change lives. Science needs your stories: your cultures, your genders, your sexualities, your cognitive differences, your opinions, your activism, your hobbies, your arts. It needs your experiences with mental health, with perfectionism, with failure. There is more, of course: bureaucracy and ingrained, often very physical, inaccessibility that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. But your voice will change the culture and structures that hold others back.
I want to leave you with the quote that made me decide to pursue science. An interviewer asks Roald Hoffmann–my personal favourite chemist, if that’s a normal thing to have-—what makes him so “unusually successful” (in my opinion, this is a fairly reasonable description of a Nobel Prize winner). Hoffmann says this:
“Maybe a better ability to empathise with other people. I’ve always had a good sense of what difficulties my colleagues in the lab are facing—even if they haven’t verbalised them. And I’ve then solved those particular problems.”
So students, do your best science. Continue to be exceptional. And while you do, remember that empathy can empower the human spirit just as much as discovery. Remember that science needs you, needs your stories. Remember to speak up. You never know who might hear. Thank you.
I’ve added a link here to the collection of interviews from which the cited one came. It’s a genuinely life-changing read. I highly recommend it.