Address by AIT President Prof. Said Irandoust at AIT’s 116th Graduation Ceremony, 21 January 2012

Address by AIT President Prof. Said Irandoust at AIT’s 116th Graduation Ceremony, 21 January 2012
H.E. Dr. Tej Bunnag, Chairman of the AIT Board of Trustees
Our Graduation Speaker Ms. Margareta Wahlstrom, Special Representative
of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction
Members of the AIT Board of Trustees and Executive Committee
Excellencies and honored guests,
Senior Members of the AIT Alumni, Faculty, Staff, former AIT facultyand
administrators

Our Dear Graduands and Family Members
 
I am delighted to welcome all of you to today’s graduation
ceremony.
We join you - our graduates - your families, friends and members of our
faculty and staff who have supported and encouraged you on this
important journey in celebration of this significant achievement and
milestone.
 
On behalf of AIT, I would also like to acknowledge the presence of
so many of our partners, and to take this opportunity to also thank
them for their valuable contributions made to the Institute, and
through whose support, several of you have been provided with an
opportunity to pursue your higher studies at AIT.
 
It is indeed very unique circumstances under which you all are
graduating, and I realize all the difficulties and challenges, you and
we as part of the AIT community have had to endure, due to the
devastating floods, which severely impacted the entire Thailand, and
AIT like so many other institutions was also not spared the wrath of
nature.
 
Thanks to the hard work, sacrifice, dedication and commitment of
members of the AIT community and support of our partners, we are able
to successfully convene today’s graduation, in spite of all the odds,
which is indeed a victory for all of us. AIT is located on low lying
area, and hence the Institute remained under water for considerably
longer period of time after the inundation. Further, our academic and
administrative buildings are restricted to two storeys, and hence half
of our infrastructure was inundated. Other universities in Bangkok have
multiple storeys, and the percentage of damage to their infrastructure
was much lesser than ours. This was an important factor while deciding
to relocate temporarily, and from that perspective also, it is indeed
quite significant what we have been able to achieve, being among the
first institutions to restart classes, and now today's graduation
ceremony.
 
We are honoured and delighted to have with us Ms. Margaret
Wahlstrom, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for
Disaster Risk Reduction as our graduation speaker. Ms. Wahlstrom has a
career spanning more than 30 years in international disaster response
and humanitarian work and in the context of what AIT as a community
recently faced, her being the graduation speaker is indeed most timely
and relevant. It also highlights the importance of communities and
countries to better prepare themselves for disasters through effective
preparedness and mitigation strategies.
 
If at beginning of last year, anyone would have told me all that
would transpire before we ended the year, I would have thought that
they were out of their mind or crazy. There is no way I would have
believed them. The lesson I think which comes out from this experience
is that we never know what lies over the next hill or around the next
corner.
 
After you have graduated from AIT, I am sure you will look back at
this period, as a phase in your life where you experienced firsthand a
natural disaster of this magnitude; both at an individual level and as
a community. At the same time I hope you will also reflect on this as a
period of hope and meaning of perseverance, virtue and integrity, and
that which demanded sacrifices, learning to cope with the unexpected
and being true to oneself on so many different levels, for these are
what matter and eventually count in the long run.
 
In one of his blogs, Jeffrey L. Seglin, who is a lecturer of
public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's
Kennedy School, writes that he usually starts his ethics class by
telling his students that he cannot teach them values, nor can he hope
to change their values. His reasoning was that one’s values are shaped
early in life, by ones earliest experiences and, above all, by the
examples - positive and negative. However, the priorities we place on
these values may change, though, depending on where we are in life.
According to him our values don't change, our priorities do, though,
and we act accordingly. These personal values that help us determine
right and wrong are the morals that guide us. Here I am reminded of
Ralph Waldo Emerson who said “what lies behind us and what lies before
us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us”
 
As a community I believe we should think beyond the boundaries
imposed on us by this devastation because there are always brilliant
solutions to be found. We have an excellent opportunity to rebuild AIT
and all of us should be very proud by the fact that AIT will become an
international intergovernmental organization under its new AIT Charter
on 30th January 2012. Given AIT’s proud history and potential, along
with its partners to do so much for the region and beyond, we must dare
to dream and dream “big”. There is a quote I am reminded of which says
“a dream becomes a reality in 4 stages; dreaming, wanting, planning,
and doing. Courage is the glue. If you don't have courage you will
never want it bad enough to plan. If you don't have courage you will
never plan it well enough to do. If you don't have courage you will
never fulfill your dreams. If you do not fulfill your dreams, you may
not have the courage to dream again.”
 
It has been said that brilliant opportunities are often cleverly
disguised as difficult challenges problems. The challenges we all face,
the difficult problems that present themselves in the future are, I
believe, brilliant opportunities you have prepared yourselves to
encounter. As you venture out into the world and on a similar message
on the topic of dreams, I would like to refer to what Erma Louise
Bombeck, the American humorist said “there are people who put their
dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've
got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a
while to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great
dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon
amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say,
"How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in”.
 
Many things have happened to us over the past few months, both
good and unexpected. I believe that after all what we have had to face
and overcome, we have become stronger, and will be able to face up to
any challenge into the future. For you students especially, I hope you
will look back on this challenging period, and reflect on what lessons
you can take from it into the future in your respective careers.
 
As our ambassadors, I am fully confident that each of you in one
way or the other will do your part by helping contribute to the
betterment of your communities, societies, regions and world.
Congratulations to each one of you once again, not only for your
accomplishments, but also for the enormous promise your future
holds.
 
Thank you

See Photo Gallery of  116th Graduation, please click
here
.