Welcome, new members of Seoul National University. I deeply regret that we are unable to meet in person and share congratulatory messages due to the spread of coronavirus. As far as I know, this is the first time that an entrance ceremony has been cancelled ever since SNU relocated to the Gwanak campus. Even so, in this unusual spring, every member of the SNU community, including myself, wholeheartedly welcomes each of you to join us much more enthusiastically,
Freshman students, even though the official entrance ceremony has been cancelled, there is no need to abandon your expectations for SNU undergraduate life, or to dampen your excitement about socializing with your peers and meeting your professors. In fact, the most significant moments at SNU, such as attending lectures, conducting research, living and socializing, actively take place within microcosms of the university. Every major and department in each college provides small but meaningful gatherings. Professors, senior students, and your classmates, who will share similar experiences of joy and pain with you, will be there waiting. I hope you will actively participate in these small SNU communities and enjoy your university life.
Some of you might already be apprehensive about required credits for your major or about the semester in which you graduate. Others might be worried about their grades rather than excited about the possibilities for the classes they might take. Particularly, while meeting both your peers, together with whom you will arduously study over the next few years, and your senior students, who already seem to have had their share of suffering, you might be channeling those concerns and worries into elaborate plans. I am not sure whether your plans will be successful or not, but what I know for sure is that the anxieties themselves are futile.
The experiences and paths of the great students before you are evidence enough. Receiving an SNU undergraduate diploma is not merely a matter of taking tests and earning credits for graduation. In fact, the difficulty of an assignment or a test is commensurate with your attitude as you choose and prepare for the classes in the first place. Every moment, you have to make a choice and resolve yourself to it. This applies not only when it comes to receiving good grades but also to building basic skills for study and research, satisfying your intellectual curiosity, and venturing into uncharted terrain. What is crucial during this process is how actively you converse with your professor, how often you have discussions and collaborate with your classmates, and whether you occasionally spend time reading alone and being reflective. Your attitude will determine your undergraduate life and influence your role in society after graduation.
I believe that a SNU member’s attitude stands out. There are those who can be trusted and followed when everyone else is lost in chaos. There are those who consider long-term goals and lead the way when everyone else obsesses over producing short-term outcomes and pursuing individual profit. There are those who spearhead inquiry and can self-reflect with a steady mind when everyone else wanders without faith. I believe that students at SNU who study, socialize, and engage in solitary deliberation will eventually become people with those strengths.
Currently, every member of Korean society is suffering from the emergence of a mutant virus and the spread of a contagious disease. This crisis we are going through at the moment is the reason why we, true SNU community members, should stay prepared through study and training in everyday life and enable ourselves to respond to challenges by demonstrating our capabilities and virtues. Every day, we need to be able to comprehend our situation with a long-term point of view and a broad outlook, to come up with alternative plans through inquiry and reflection, and to strengthen our capabilities and virtues by speaking out independently, unswayed by either ideologies or partisanship. I hope your university life will be conducive to building such strengths.
Even before entering SNU, you must have been surrounded by expectations from the communities to which you belonged. However, expectations from your close ones can sometimes be burdensome. There is certainly some degree of satisfaction in rising to meet the expectations of your family, friends, groups, and communities. However, those fulfillments may sometimes be limited to short-sighted profits only pertinent to the prospects of your family and community. Your ideals must not be confined to those ends. They must exceed narrow objectives and envision vast achievements. They must demonstrate new visions and illuminate their feasibility. Your ideals must become a new source of pride that your loved ones could never have even dreamt of.
A few years from now, you will graduate from SNU’s undergraduate program. Some of you will stay here and continue studying, while others will be tasked with new roles in new places. Each of you will carry on with your life responsibly like a SNU member, but one day, you will be reminded of your fellow students who, like yourself, started their university life in 2020 without an entrance ceremony. When you do, I hope you will be able to look back on this day with a little smile on your face. I hope you will be able to remember that despite the disorderly beginning, the process was fulfilling and that every moment you spent with your colleagues at the university was beautiful. All faculty members and the whole staff, including myself, will do our best to make this possible. The upperclassmen likewise will feel the same towards you. Already, I eagerly anticipate how proud you will make us. And once again, I heartily congratulate you on your matriculation.