Giving Back What Others Have Given You …

Giving Back What Others Have Given You …

To me, along with Steve Jobs, one of the best graduation speeches was by Tim Minchin, and who outlined: [here]:

Be a teacher. Please, please, please be a teacher. Teachers are the most admirable and important people in the world. You don’t have to do it forever. But if you’re in doubt about what to do, be an amazing teacher just for your 20s. Be a teacher, be a primary school teacher, especially if you’re a bloke. We need male primary school teachers.

Even if you’re not a teacher, be a teacher, share your ideas. Don’t take for granted your education, rejoice in what you learn and spray it.

Most of us have benefited greatly from education and were possibly inspired at one time in our lives by a special teacher. For me, it was my biology teacher at school who brought his subject to life. And, it was George Rae — a Senior lecturer in electronics — whose every word meant something to me. His passion and his belief in his students were things I have never seen in any other person. In fact, George was years ahead of every other teacher I have ever seen and adopted multimedia in his lectures, while others just spoke about it. He showed me how to be inventive in my teaching while focusing on what really matters in topics.

And, so, what? Well, as I said, we have all benefited from education, and if you can, you should try to give something back. Albert Einstein defined:

“It is every person’s obligation to put back into the world, at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.”

We can all be great teachers and/or mentors and help people in the way that others have helped us. And what I love is when our graduates come back, give back to our current students, and share their experiences. And, so, yesterday, we had a Cloudstrike team coming along to speak to our students — and giving something back.

This is the second time Hela Lucas (2nd on the left) has been back, and this time she brought another graduate (Daniel Hamilton — on the right-hand side). Carrie (on the left) is a current student who will join Croudstrike. Our great graduates fondly remember their time with ENUSEC> [here] (our amazing cybersecurity society), and where they possibly learnt as much from being in that society as they did on many of their modules.

And, so, for the record, here’s some photos of the event:

In fact, if you look closely at Daniel’s photo, that’s me in the background — this made me smile:

But, there’s another great advantage, and it is where graduates come back and tell us what the current jobs landscape is like, and what are important in the jobs market. By listening to these things, we have continually developed our modules, so that the match the requirements of industry. For Hela, in her role of an incident responder, it about being good at understanding networking, and in studying digital forensics methods.

And, so, along with our graduates coming back, we also get great computer scientists coming back continually to talk to our students. For them, they would often rather talk with students, than to a large conference audience. If you are interested, here are some of our up-and-coming talks [here]:

And there are so many more people, who have continually come back and talked with students about their experiences, and inspired a whole new generation. These include the mighty Dr Don Smith (the most knowledge person I have ever known in cybersecurity):

James Kwaan, and, if he wasn’t an amazing cybersecurity specialist, would have made a great teacher:

and, someone, who has been back virtually every year with new insights, the ever youthful and inspiring, Harry McLaren:

The young student who didn’t quite know which direction to take in his career, but turned into an amazing cybersecurity leader (Dr Jamie Graves):

Education changed my life, and has brought me everything I would ever want. I live in an amazing city. I teaching fanastic students. I teach and research the subjects that I love. I could never give back what it has given me.

For you, if you have time, go be a great teacher/mentor to others, and give back — at least — what you have received! Believe that education can change the world for the better.

rejoice in what you learn and spray it