Today is the 4th July, a day for celebrating independence. Alongside those who graduated with me in the Whitworth Building, I’m celebrating independence. Not the traditional independence marked by independence days around the world, but independence of thinking and independence of learning. These are two of the most important things and education can give you. I’m grateful to have received these gifts from my teachers and fellow students.
Studying any subject for an extended period of time can give you two things that help you become more independent.
- Better critical thinking skills, since its the 4th July, let’s call them free and independent thinking skills
- Bigger social and professional networks of friends, mentors, peers, role-models, task masters, teachers and collaborators that you meet in the communities you join and the teams you are part of. These are probably bigger and more diverse than the communities you were part of at high school.
If you’re graduating this year, you might be wondering what those years of study were all about, particularly now that you’ve finally got some time to properly reflect on it.
What was that all about? Are you stuffed? Was it worth it?
Studying anything is a like having a large meal. When you finish, you feel stuffed and probably over-indulged. You couldn’t eat another thing, not even a wafer thin mint. Instead of having a bellyful of food, you have head crammed full of the ideas that you learned in labs, lectures and across campus, from the whole community around you. Some of these ideas are easily digested, others take longer. They all become a part of you.
Universities are sometimes called the nourishing mother, in latin alma mater. But that should be plural, not singular, because you’re nourished by many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, siblings, uncles etc a whole intellectual family around you. So alma familia – (nourishing family), would be a more accurate description of what Universities should actually be doing.
If you’re graduating now, you might not feel like eating again, but you can always come back later in the restaurant of lifelong learning. There’s always something new on the menu, some “dish” you haven’t tried yet. The door is always open to learning and it doesn’t have to be in academia, you can learn just as much in the workplace.
Thanks, plant scientists
My degree was called Applied Plant Sciences, when you tell people that, the usual reaction is WTF? The Applied bit is what the University used to call Industrial or Professional Experience (IE). Plant Sciences is a discipline that used to be called Botany, but since that usually invokes images of skipping through meadows, pressing plants and speaking Latin binomials, it’s usually known as Plant Sciences. We did skip through meadows a bit but it was only 20 credits out of 300. The rest of the degree studied the growth, reproduction and evolution of plant life at every level from the molecular, biochemical, genetic and cellular through to physiological and ecological over the last 3.5 billion years of life on earth.
Another way of describing what a degree means is to list all the people who taught it. Thanks to Tony Trinci (microbiology) Bob Callow (Genetics) Jackie Potter (final year project supervisor), Liz Sheffield (botany) Joan Watson (palaeobotany) [1], Keith Gull (molecular biology) Amanda Bamford (physiology), Laurence Cook (genetics), Robin Baker (sperm wars – some plants have motile sperm too!) Sean Edwards (systematics), John Lee (ecology) John Tallis (ecology), Michael Emes (biochemistry), Allan G. Lowe (biochemistry), Roland Ennos (biomechanics), Phil Harris (placement year), Malcolm Press CBE (ecology), Harry Epton, Dick Benton, Robert W. Foster (computational biology), Fred Rumsey. Thanks to all the teachers whose names I can’t remember. This is slightly embarrassing but it was a while ago! Some maths (calculus and statistics) more cell biologists & geneticists from first year who are a hazier memory, some environmental and agricultural economics. All those GTAs and technicians in the labs, and all those administrators in the back office who kept the wheels turning. Different people are affected by different teachers in different ways. For me, thes teachers that had the biggest influence on me were:
- Tony Trinci: Some Professors have sharp elbows that accompany their sharp minds and their sharp tongues. Not Tony. He was approachable and treated undergraduates with kindness and respect, while also being on top of his game academically. Thanks Tony (1936-2020) and RIP.
- Liz Sheffield: successfully drilled into many undergraduates the importance of written English, not just as a tool for communication but as a tool for thinking. Some of this was done using Biological Sciences Review a magazine distributed to thousands of A-level students across the UK and beyond. Liz supervised my dissertation on Signal Transduction During Embryogenesis in Fucoid Algae, snappy title no? It’s one of the pieces of work I was most proud of, largely because she gave me honest, patient, timely and constructive feedback on it.
- Michael Emes: When a subject gets difficult and technical, as biochemistry sometimes does, it can be tempting to dumb it down to make it more accessible for students. Mike Emes never did this with his courses, and the labs were great. They were also hard work and challenging, but always worth the effort required of students and teachers alike.
- Malcolm Press: ecologists like Malcolm often go on interesting field trips and sometimes they take them with you. Malcolm organised a memorable field trip to Majorca (lots of endemic species) and the Arctic circle, speaking of which..
- Jackie Potter: I was humble field assistant to Jackie’s postdoc research at Abisko Scientific Research Station in Northern Sweden, by far and away the best summer job I had. Jackie had the unglamorous job of supervising my employment, reading my project report and giving me feedback. Thanks Jackie.
- Phil Harris, hosted my placement year in industry, I had a lot of growing up to do when I was an undergraduate and I did some of that growing up during my placement year which was supervised by Phil and others, affiliated to Coventry University. Thanks Phil.
- Robin Baker, there were plenty of eccentric academics with interesting ideas in what is now the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health (FBMH). One of them was Robin who ran courses on the crazy world of behavioural ecology. Thanks Robin and RIP (1944-2026), so long and thanks for all the sperm wars.
Thanks to all my fellow students, can’t name them all here but Lucy, Hannah, Chris, Andy, Clare, Paul, Zoe, Alistair, Vanessa, Andy (for telling me about BUNAC) and Merc from Mountaineering & Climbing club. Thanks to Helena Björn van Praagh, Terry Callaghan, Mats Sonesson, Nils-Åke Andersson, Rosie, Nick, Dylan, Karin, Kjell, Lennart, Marion, Martin, Ulf from ANS. Why name all these people? Again? Gratitude goes along way to improving everybody’s mental health but there’s another reason:
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known” —Chuck Palahniuk Invisible Monsters [2]
So thanks to all my teachers for your combined efforts.
Lessons to younger students, graduands and graduates
A question I like asking students of all ages is to imagine they have a time travel machine. Using this machine to meet their former selves, what would advice would they offer? What have they learned during their course? Everyone gives an interesting and different answer, so here’s mine
- Grades don’t matter as much as you probably think they do. Like many students, I was obsessed with grades (especially in final year). Get the best grades you can, but remember that many employers are much less interested in your grades than you are. Employers of all kinds are much more interested in who you are and what you can do. You are much more than your grades.
- Network more and learn more from your peers, deliberately and frequently, study buddies, revision groups, peer support and peer learning, call it what you want. It’s al good. The medics call it see one, do one, teach one but this phenomenon extends way beyond medicine. [3]
- Extra-curriculars and experience make you unique: I’d done a lot of these, two summer internships, a year in industry and a gap year, various societies, because they were interesting and fun. I wasn’t thinking about my polishing my CV, but it was all the extra-curricular and co-curricular activities that helped job applications stand out later, and helped me build skills and knowledge you can’t get from formal academic study.
- It can take years to digest whatever it is you’re trying to learn, so reflect deliberately and frequently and be patient, some lessons take time. You might not even realise what you’re actually learning until you reflect on it because it can happen slowly when you’re not looking.
Independent time travel
The TODAY is the title of this article is not 4th July 2026, or even the 4th July 1776, but the 4th July 1996, I got here using a time-travel machine and a hole in the space-time continuum called the The University of Manchester Graduation Archive YouTube channel. There is footage here every year stretching back to 1987. The screenshot above is taken from this video: youtube.com/watch?v=tfF43_2i2XQ&t=1658s
Thanks to Julian Skyrme for pointing out the graduation archive which captures the Happy Days of the Summer of ’96, and many others. Back in the summer of ’96. Woah Yeah!
References
- Grainne P Kearney, Nick Gardiner, Davina Carr, Martina Kelly, Gerard J Gormley, (2025) See one, do one, teach one: other professionals don’t accept this so why should the medical profession? BMJ 2025; 389 DOI:10.1136/bmj.r432
- Joan Watson (2005) One hundred and fifty years of palaeobotany at Manchester University, Geological Society, London, Special Publications, Volume 241, Pages 229 – 257 DOI:10.1144/GSL.SP.2003.207.01.16
- Chuck Palahniuk (1999) Invisible Monsters, W. W. Norton & Company
This articles is also available at linkedin.com/pulse/thank-you-everybody-who-helped-me-graduate-today-duncan-hull–dxq2e
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