Welcome back on campus! For those who just joined us at HC in your second year, welcome to our HC family! If you are newcomers, you might not know that I send out emails every Friday during the semester to share with you my thoughts on different, sometimes random, topics (you can access previous ones on our HC website). This is not a regular Friday email, although today is Friday.
Starting off with our UM Motto, being “Humanity, Integrity, Propriety, Wisdom and Sincerity” (仁、義、禮、知、信), I hope you will bear in mind these as your personality traits and goals for your careers and life-long achievements. People often learn from experience to build and strengthen these traits. What we might not be aware of is that our experiences also tend to impact our decisions, and education can help us overcome these biases in our experience. Professor Douglas Diamond of University of Chicago, the 2022 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, mentioned in his article:
“Being able to draw on different views, different beliefs, and different perspectives is important for innovation. When your thinking isn’t confined to the events of your own experience, you’ve got a major competitive advantage in an environment where you’ve got to get out first ahead of rivals… Your experiences matter more than you may realize. The key is to use them to amplify and build on your knowledge, rather than being biased by them.”
You can read his article here .
A second point I would like emphasize is that, if you are now in your second year, please do not compare your workload with that in your first year, for two reasons. Year one is a foundation year, usually with many general courses with general concepts. Year two will be the start of more discipline focused, often more demanding, courses with new concepts. Coupled with this is the additional course requirement from HC. So, please DO NOT underestimate the workload of your second year. With that, all we want from you is your participation in HC activities, and sharing with us your ideas of how you want to contribute to HC, and what you think HC could provide.
I will resume our regular Friday emails once our first year newcomers start joining us in October. Stay tuned!
See you around! Have a nice second teaching weekend of the semester!