Craig Roy

Ladies and gentlemen, graduates, congratulations.

This is your day, you’ve worked really hard to be here, it’s terrific to see, with so many family and friends here to support you along the way. I jumped out of the taxi at Thomas Street, and I walked out and it was drizzling, there was some light rain in there, but what struck me, what absolutely struck me, was that it didn’t get in your way. You were out there with family and friends in the courtyard taking photos in the rain, and it just showed me how important this was, not just to you, but to the family and friends that join you. It’s also my significant privilege to be some small part of your ceremony today, speaking as one science graduate to another.

Many of you will have taken different pathways to get here. But I’m sure you’ve got some common traits in common, and your science journey will have started a long time ago. It started before you joined UTS, it started before your high school certificate, and it most likely started before your high school. Because as the Pro-Chancellor was saying, it’s a way of thinking. So I’m very confident that many of you are fascinated with solving problems, with understanding how things work, and even in making the world a better place, and they’re traits you should never lose. Some of you will have had teachers who inspired you to follow a passion in science, some of you it will have been family and friends, and some of you it would have just been in your DNA and you were always destined to follow a career in science. So whatever your journey, whatever your journey to get here today, you should be very, very proud of what you’ve done and your commitment over such a long period of time. No university in this country gives away science degrees. It’s your tireless effort, and everyone who walked across this podium put thousands and thousands of efforts into receiving your certificate just over that period of time.

You should also be very proud of the university you graduated from. UTS is an outstanding university, and as the Pro-Chancellor said before, you’ll carry that with you for the rest of your career, and you’ve got a great alumni network to support upon. This might sound a little strange, but your country’s also really proud of you, Australia is proud of you. We don’t have enough scientists in this country. We don’t have enough people who are going to solve the big problems of today and tomorrow, to make our country fair, prosperous and a decent world for all of us. Scientists and engineers make major contributions to that on behalf of our country.

Now this moment is about you, but they said in this occasional address you need to weave a little bit in of your own background there to help the graduates with some of the things you might have done. So it’s a little over 30 years ago that I was sitting in your shoes, in a similar audience to this, graduating from a science degree, mine personally in mathematics. And I must say, it seemed such a long time ago when I say it, but time, and it happens to you, if you’re having fun it just passes so quickly, it’s just a blink of an eye and it changes. And sitting in that chair where you are, back in, you know, a bit over 30 years ago, I didn’t know what I was going to do when I left. I maybe knew what year or two ahead, but I certainly didn’t know decades ahead. But that doesn’t matter, because the learnings you’ve picked up over the course of your time at UTS will hold you in very good stead for whatever you choose to do.

And as was said before, the world is moving quicker than ever before. So many of you, when I graduate, weren’t here. But just to remind those who weren’t here – we had no Wi-Fi, we had no internet, we had no email, phones were the size of house bricks, no Netflix, no Facebook, all the sort of stuff that you enjoy today. No knowledge of how to treat the sort of infectious diseases we can. But when many of you were joining high school, so let’s say about 2006, to 2016, the number of smart connected devices globally jumped from two billion to fifteen billion today. So we’ve gone from change that’s just linear, to change that’s become absolutely exponential over that period of time. But that was only possible because of people like you. Scientists and engineers like you made these things and other advances possible. The world would be a fundamentally different place without people like you, fascinated with solving problems, with understanding how things work, and making the world a better place. In terms of workforce change, at CSIRO we’ve recently examined the future of employment in Australia, looking particularly at the influence of digital disruption, and it paints an incredible picture rife with opportunity. Exponential growth, you know we heard a snippet from Gates before, but exponential growth in technological capabilities is transforming everything we do, from supply chains right through to reshaping and redefining jobs.

There won’t be a part of our society that’s not impacted in what or how we do work. In fact, it’s going to create jobs that we haven’t even dreamt up yet. So this should be looked at as an opportunity rather than a threat, as your training and education sets you up perfectly for the limitless options that lay ahead of you. Too often – and it happens in CSIRO – too often we look at the downside to change, rather than looking at the opportunities and how we can embrace change. So embrace it, there’s the message I’ve got for you, to embrace change don’t fear change along the way. So how does that tie back into where we are today? You’re all graduating with science degrees. Well our research also tells us that STEM science, technology, engineering and maths knowledge is associated with 75 per cent of the fastest growing occupations. So three in four, that’s a pretty astronomical thing. So you’re in the fast lane. You picked a degree that put you in the fast lane, and it’s up to you whether you take that lane or not.

So amongst all this change and disruption, your training prepares you for an exciting and varied career. So you could follow some of the very learned folks who just graduated from a doctoral degree, and again I’d like to personally congratulate you all, that’s an amazing effort, an amazing array of hard work. You could follow that career. You could follow it into academia or on the science bench. You could become a politician, you could become a community leader, you could become a business leader. And I would say Australia has some fantastic scientists working in academia in great institutions like UTS and like CSIRO. I also would say we don’t have enough scientists working outside of those areas. To lift Australia’s innovation performance, we need more scientists like you working across the whole of our workforce. Let me turn back the clock again, and in my own case I joined the Navy straight from high school. Went to the naval college down at Jervis Bay. And the Navy saw benefits in education, so the Navy put me through a Bachelor of Science, subsequently a Master’s of Science degree. And in my early days in the Navy at age 22 I was responsible for navigating a naval destroyer around the world’s oceans, so wherever we needed to go, we went. It was exhilarating, it was exciting, and it was an amazing responsibility at just 22 years of age. It was fun and it was challenging, but it wasn’t enough. Um, I distinctly remember being on the bridge of a ship, it was HMAS Parramatta, in the dark of the night, it was around 2 am and I was working. There was nothing to see, it was a totally black night, and it gave me time to think and something snapped and I said at that time I knew I wanted to get back to my science roots. And a big decision to make, but it’s something I’ll never regret. So I became an oceanographer and meteorologist at that stage, and stayed with the Navy for another 20 years. It’s a fantastic organisation. And after that, joined the CSIRO. But it was the foundations you’ve learnt over the last three years that held me instead to be able to adjust as the world adjusted around me, and take your own future. So whatever the future holds for you, you should feel excited about what lies ahead. Your scientific roots will provide you with terrific foundation to build upon, and it’s up to you to make your own future. People will be around to guide you and support you, but no-one’ll do it for you. So grab it, work hard for it, and have fun along the way.

So whatever you do, you’ll be doing it with a great advantage, and that great advantage is the science degree you’ve just graduated from today. And keep that passion we all saw in that courtyard in the rain when we came in today, where no one cared about what was going on around, no one cared about the rain. You just cared about what you’d achieved and what you’d done, and sharing it with loved ones around you and that was a terrific thing to be able to witness. So enjoy this day, reflect with family and friends, have fun with family and friends. It is a big deal, it’s a very big deal. You will look back on this and say, this was one of the big deals that I achieved through my, ah, life. So thank you, ah, Pro-Chancellor for the opportunity to speak today, and best wishes to all the graduates.