Speeches

Dean Professor Au, Colleagues and Students, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Welcome to the 2024 graduation ceremony.

My congratulations to our students on successfully completing your programmes of study at HKMU.

Graduation marks, for students, the end of one stage in their lives and the beginning of another.

It is a good time to reflect on your experiences during the past few years at the University.

Perhaps a few questions will help you, our graduates, focus on what you learned at HKMU:

Was anything new and/or useful?
Did your studies help you enter the workforce?
Are you now in a position to develop a meaningful career?

If your answers are “yes”, congratulations! I am happy for you.

If your answers are less than affirmative, we may want to ask “why?” and “can you take any steps to rectify this?”

I hope that, even if you did not acquire much discipline-specific knowledge, you recorded other achievements – such as obtaining a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses.

You might also have enrolled in a postgraduate programme to make yourself more competitive.

Alternatively, you might have established your own business or a startup, or discovered a new career path.

You could also have identified a new direction in life or made some friends who will accompany you on your journey going forward.

In my view, the ultimate question is:

“Have you developed into a better person who is ready to make a useful contribution to Hong Kong and our country?”

On the subject of achievements, I would like to discuss the results of a university ranking list released this month.

A high score from a commercial agency has never been and will not be HKMU's main focus or goal in the foreseeable future.

But an agency did rank us last year, without our knowledge.

The agency confined itself to publicly available information, which in our case does not cover all the components used to compile the ranking. As a result, we received a low or even zero score for components that we do not publish data on, as you can imagine.

This year we gave the agency official data and our rank jumped about 200 positions.

It is worth noting that some of the component scores are based on an average of six years' data, so a fair reflection of our performance will take several years to reach.

Further on the subject of achievements, I am pleased to report that our proposals to the Research Grants Council drew $34.5 million in funding, the highest among all self-financed institutions. The allocation accounts for 40 per cent of funding to the self-financed institution sector this year.

You can be sure that HKMU will continue to develop its physical campus, strive for academic excellence and improve learning and teaching facilities.

Underlining our efforts to work with the broad community in Hong Kong, we plan to build a new campus, designed to serve as a Hub for Community Health and Wellness in Ho Man Tin. We also bought a hotel and renovated it as accommodation for international students and researchers. The new facility, named MU88, further enhances our internationalisation.

We will focus on providing quality education to students, and work tirelessly and purposefully to make HKMU a university that you will be proud of.

In closing, I would like to thank your parents, family members and teachers for supporting you throughout this journey.

I wish you every success and hope to see you again very soon!

Thank you!