New Student Orientation 2018: Opening Program Remarks to Parents and Students, Class of 2022

Good morning! On behalf of President Brown and Provost Morrison, it is my great pleasure to welcome you all to Boston University. I’m delighted to see you here so early in the morning. A special welcome to those of you who are on campus for the first time. I hope you will discover over the next two days, what I have discovered in my six short years at BU: that you have entered a lively, challenging, diverse, and warm community.

To you parents here, I look forward to getting to know the exceptional young people you have raised, and to helping provide a rich array of opportunities for them to learn, to grow, to discover who they are, and how they want to make a difference in the world.

To you students of the class of 2022, welcome! I’m here to say a few introductory words about the heart of your Boston University experience—the intellectual adventure you are about to undertake. As one of the nation’s leading private research universities, BU offers more than 130
undergraduate majors in fields as diverse as Middle East and North African Studies, biomedical engineering, psychology, and theatre performance; nearly 75 minors (how about Earth and Environmental Sciences, or International Relations, or my own field, English literature?), and hundreds of courses from which you will choose to create for yourself an education that will open new worlds and new possibilities for yourself.

At the center of your BU experience is our new general education program, the BU Hub. The Hub is the common educational experience for all BU undergraduates. While each of you will choose your own pathway—you will “hub” in your own way—you will all be developing six essential capacities—the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that will equip you to thrive in our increasingly complex and interconnected world—and thrive not just in your professional life, but also in your personal and civic life. In courses and cocurricular experiences, in your major and out, across all 4 years, through the BU Hub you will explore the university’s rich array of learning experiences as you develop ways of thinking crucial to your future: Philosophical, Aesthetic and Historical Interpretation; Social and Scientific Inquiry; Diversity, Civic Engagement and Global Citizenship; Communication; Quantitative Reasoning, and something we call the Intellectual Toolkit. You will hear much more about the Hub later today, so for now make a note to book mark the BU Hub website (www.bu.edu/hub) and the BU Bulletin (which you can find on the main BU page under academics)–your sources of information for all academic programs.

As you meet with your advisors to talk about your interests and aspirations, and to select the courses you will take this year, I encourage you to go forth in a spirit of exploration and adventure. Try new things: choose provocative classes that expose you to new ideas and alternative ways of thinking. The BU Hub embodies the broad education that is a distinctive feature of American higher education, part of what feeds our creativity. So embrace that great tradition. Experiment. Take intellectual chances, choose a course in a field you know nothing about. It should be scary, and thrilling: that’s what education is. Education: from the Latin educare—to lead out.

BU’s incredibly talented faculty will be your guides and allies in your exploration. They are your greatest resource. The scholars here are leaders in their fields and are applying their expertise through scholarship, research and real-world practice to address both the most pressing challenges of the day and the enduring human questions. Get to know them – talk to them after class, seek them out at campus events and during office hours (they are there waiting for you to come talk), ask them about their research, tell them about your own ideas. They will challenge you, guide you, and open doors to new possibilities.

You have chosen to study at a research university: so, what does that mean for you? The heart of BU as a major research university is a culture of inquiry. As faculty, we are hired to ask questions and to explore possible answers—in collaboration with our colleagues here and at other universities, with our graduate students, and with our undergraduates. The products of our research are (in engineering and other fields) new inventions; (in the sciences) new discoveries about how the natural and physical worlds work; (in the social sciences) new knowledge of human behavior; (in the humanities) new understandings of the record of human achievement, of who we are and what our lives mean; and (in the arts) new expressions of the human spirit. We register patents, begin start-up companies, deliver papers, write articles and books, give performances, mount exhibitions, and teach courses—all ways of taking our new works, our new ideas into the world, with the aim (and it’s a lofty one) of improving human life and the planet on which we live it. This culture of inquiry is the culture into which you are entering. You have gotten here in part by becoming excellent at answering questions; we’re now asking you to learn to ASK questions. To explore possible answers. To ask more questions. And, perhaps hardest of all, to hold off the impulse to supply quick answers, to learn to live in the suspense of not knowing. As part of your participation in this culture of inquiry, work with your advisors to plan how you are going to undertake your own work of original research, scholarship or creative activity–working on a professor’s research in a lab, say, or pursuing an independent project under the guidance of a faculty member—maybe an exploration of a favorite writer or an analysis of the immigrant crisis, or composing a new piece of music—all ways of generating new ideas, new knowledge, which is the fundamental work of a research university. Funding for such projects for undergraduates—for supplies, for a summer stipend so you have time to immerse yourself in a project– is available to you through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (or UROP) which granted nearly a million dollars last year to around 400 students for research that resulted in hundreds of presentations, publications and abstracts. Look out for the UROP Research Symposium on Family and Friends’ Weekend. You will be amazed at what your fellow students have done and at what you, too, can do at BU.

You have come to Boston University. When you step outside of the studio or lab or classroom, not only will you discover a campus that is teeming with activities – student organizations, clubs, athletics, exhibitions, performances, community service programs – you will find the whole city of Boston at your doorstep. The courses you will take and the professors you will get to know enliven, and are enlivened by, the rich and vibrant culture of the university and the great city around us. Get out into the city. Take a course that uses Boston as its classroom. Sign up for community service. Head over to the Museum of Science or down to the Institute for Contemporary Art for an afternoon. Take your reading to a bench in the Public garden. Ask your new roommate to go with you to a free concert at Jordan Hall or get standing room tickets to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. Your experiences in the city and around the campus are part of your education—and essential to your discovery of your community, what makes BU a university, your university, in and of the city of Boston.

Finally, I would encourage you to take advantage of BU’s position as one of the world’s premier international institutions. While our connection with the City of Boston roots us in this unique place with its rich history and fond traditions, we derive our sense of who we are in this place from a long history of students, faculty and staff who have ventured beyond our campus and city boundaries to engage internationally, and from a long history of faculty and students from around the world who have come to BU to study and pursue research. BU offers an immense array of opportunities to create a truly global education, by, first, getting to know—really know—your fellow students. Look around: the world is here. To our international students: reach out, as difficult as this is when you are in a strange place and the familiar sounds and tastes and smells seem far away. Ask questions about how things work here; don’t be afraid to show you don’t know; make the effort to make real friends with students from the US and other countries. US students: I say the same: step outside your national borders here on Comm Ave, and welcome your fellow students from around the world. Ask how things are done in their countries. Find out about their lives, their ideas, what matters to them. Express your curiosity and your understanding of what it feels like to be in an unfamiliar place with people you don’t know. You may feel awkward or afraid that, in your ignorance, that you will say the wrong thing and offend. And you probably will. We are all ignorant— we are all awkward in our not-knowing, we all sometimes say the wrong thing. A few moments of awkwardness, embarrassment—or an offense given and forgiven– are a small price to pay for what you will learn about other people, about other cultures, and for the human warmth you will discover. Then, you students from Minnesota, Massachusetts, California and the rest of the United States: set aside your fear and go earn your Hub unit in Global Citizenship by taking the plunge your international classmates have already taken: study abroad, go conduct international research, perform overseas, or engage in public service on the other side of the world. It will be challenging. And I guarantee it will change your life.

As you set out on the incredible journey that will help to shape the thinkers, workers, citizens, and difference-makers you are destined to be, I would invite you to consider the difference between education and training. Here is a fact: you are likely to live 60-70 years after you graduate from BU—that’s an astonishing number of years, during which a lot will change, and in ways we don’t know. Training, from the Latin “to drag,” to pull after, is preparation for the known; education, again, “to raise up” and “to lead out” is preparation for the unknown. Preparing for your first job is important—
and you will find here plenty of support for that—but much more important is educating yourself broadly across the range of human interests and endeavors so that you are ready for 70 years of intelligent, informed, creative, compassionate engagement with the unexpected.*

I want you to know that the entire University community is here to support, sustain, and encourage you as you commit to study at BU. We could not be more privileged to welcome you into this vibrant learning community. It is you who make us what we are, and we look forward to the fresh ideas and
energy you bring to our campus. I speak for the entire faculty, staff, and student community of Boston University in saying we are so happy you have made the decision to join us. Welcome!

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* Thanks to Maynard Mack, Jr., founder of the Honors Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, for this thought, which I gladly borrow with his permission.