“One Last Review Session”
Chuck Yeung delivers his commencement address
Penn State Behrend Commencement Address
Dr. Chuck Yeung, associate professor of physics
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Once again I’d like to congratulate the Penn State Behrend Class of 2006 on your outstanding achievement.
When I was invited to give the commencement speech I asked myself, What did my students really want more of when they were in my classes? Did they want more homework? No, I don’t remember anyone asking for more homework.
Did they want more exams? No, once in a great while I got a request for more exams, but not very often.
What students always wanted were review sessions before exams. So I thought, why not make our graduates happy, and offer one last review session before we send you on your way?
The question then became, What did we as faculty at Penn State Behrend hope that you learned during your college career? Do I, your friendly neighborhood physics professor, believe that you will remember how to use Gauss’ Law to find the electric field in situations with high symmetry? Well, I would be very happy if you did, but I don’t really expect it.
Does math professor Dr. Antonella Cupilliari expect that you can find the surface of revolution of some curve rotated about an arbitrary axis? Well, she would be very happy if you did, but she also probably does not expect you to.
Does Dr. Dan Frankforter, a history professor, expect you to know which king of France consolidated the power of the monarchy and how this was accomplished? Come to think of it, he probably does expect you to know this, but Dr. Frankforter is older and has higher standards than the rest of us.
So if not these things, what do we hope you have learned at Behrend? I certainly hope that you have the technical knowledge that will give you a rewarding job with a nice fat paycheck, or perhaps admission to a prestigious graduate program or some other satisfying endeavor. However, beyond those specific things I hope that your years at Behrend have taught you something more general.
First, push your limits. I hope that we have taught you that the things that are the most challenging are also those that are, in the end, most rewarding. Years from now, when you run into one of your old Behrend buddies and the discussion turns to your classes, I think the courses that you will remember will be those that made you really work and work and struggle, until, hopefully, just before they were over, you figured it all out.
What you will remember will be that senior project that you worked on 24/7 for your last month here. (Hopefully this is also when you learned to not wait to start an assignment until the very last minute.) I hope your experience here means that you will not be afraid of the new challenges that await you, but will see them as an opportunity for learning and growth.
Second, I hope that your experience at Behrend has given you a love of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. I hope that you took the opportunity to get involved in courses and activities outside your chosen field. In the future you’ll find that most great creative accomplishments come from people who are able to connect ideas in seemingly unrelated fields and put them to work in new and interesting ways. The only way to develop this skill is to create as a broad background as possible by exposing yourself to those different ideas in the first place. I hope that your experience at Behrend means that you will continue to strive to learn as much as you can.
Third, I hope that you have taken the opportunity to meet and make friends with people from many different backgrounds. This experience exposes you to many points of view and strengthens your empathy for people whose life circumstances are not the same as yours. Your time at Behrend will help you see the shades of gray inherent in every important issue in society. We have taught you to respect different viewpoints. I hope that what you have learned here will mean that you will not make snap judgments based on preconceived notions, but thoughtfully listen to all sides of an argument before making a decision.
Once again I would like to congratulate our graduating class. Let me wish you good luck in the future and leave you with the only thing that I actually remember from my own undergraduate commencement speech, an old Irish blessing: May the road rise to meet your feet.
Chuck Yeung is a summa cum laude graduate of Cornell University and earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the faculty of the School of Science in 1994 after postdoctoral fellowships at the universities of Pittsburgh and Toronto. He is a recipient of both the Penn State Behrend Council of Fellows’ Research Award and its Excellence in Teaching Award.