Treasures in the University?
Vincent Chang
Vice-Chancellor and President
Brac University
Orientation Fall 2021
October 17, 2021
High Commissioner Robert, guests, colleagues, and dear students. Good afternoon. Welcome to Brac University, virtually for now. As the pandemic situation is improving, we are planning to fully reopen the university. So, I look forward to welcoming all of you, physically, soon.
There have been many talks about return to normalcy after the pandemic is over. However, based on my own experiences and observations in the past 30 years, there has been no well-defined normalcy. The world just keeps changing, faster and faster, and sometime beyond our comprehension.
Particularly, in this pandemic, staff and faculty have talked to me about their anxieties over the future. I have also received increasing number of inquiries, from students, parents, prospective students and prospective students’ parents, asking about what subjects to study and how to prepare for the future.
So, I thought I would talk a bit, from my own experience and observations. I’d like to point out several phenomena in the making in the last 30 years as they will likely continue for a foreseeable future.
VUCA
First of all, this has been a VUCA world in the last 30 years since the end of the Cold War. VUCA, V-U-C-A, is an acronym. A VUCA world is a world that is V volatile, U uncertain or unpredictable or unknown, C complex, and A ambiguous. And going forward from now, the world will likely be increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex.
I shall focus on the job market. The so-called ‘normalcy’ in the past 30 years and likely in the following 30 years is that the speed of a job’s destruction and creation is getting faster and faster and that many jobs today may become obsolete in 5-30 years.
Let me share with you my personal experiences, although my industry experiences are all in the US, they are still highly relevant.
When I worked as an engineer in the Silicon Valley of California in the 1990s, there was no Google, no Facebook, no Amazon.com. Some companies that we admired when were HP (Hewlett Packard) and Intel but they are not as attractive as before to the top students; or Sun Micro System which perhaps you have never heard of; or AOL (America On Line) which is long gone.
There was a cool company called Silicon Graphics, which both then President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore visited. My company was just across the street from Silicon Graphics; I remember I waited by the road side to watch Clinton’s arrival. Now there is no such company, and its site now is used by Google.
On the other end of the spectrum was a company called Qualcomm. It was a new company. They offered me a position and a significant number of stock options. I did not accept their offer because the company was too new and I was just a fresh graduate. Now it is an extremely successful company. If I had taken their offer at that time, I could have been retired comfortably a long while ago if I chose so.
After the Silicon Valley, I worked on the Wall Street in New York City in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. At that time, top MBA students would compete for an investment banking position in top firms such as Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers. Both companies are gone. The old JP Morgan that I worked for has become the new JP Morgan; I remember that Wall Street Journal announced the old JP Morgan no more by declaring the death of high finance. I also experienced the meltdown of the emerging markets; imagine that South Korea was on the verge of going bankrupt, and Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, and Brazil were all badly hit.
After the Wall Street, I started my own startup. I had several Berkeley classmates ran their own startups too. We were like riding our own rollercoaster through the boom and bust of the dot-com era -- I saw companies rising, I saw companies falling.
Later, I worked for ExxonMobil, an energy company which was #1 on top of the Fortune 500 list. For a period of time, the company was very solid and its CEO would later become the Secretary of State of the US. Now very few young people are seriously interested in it.
These were in the past – volatile and unpredictable. What about going forward? Going forward, because of AI, Big Data and other technologies, the world will likely be more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
According to various reports, 60% of jobs that we know of today will disappear by 2050. The good news is there will be new jobs created but we cannot be sure what they are.
So, in the next 30 years, almost surely there’ll be new companies, that we still don’t know about today, taking the commanding places of today’s Google and Apple; we’ll see many jobs being cut or made obsolete; and we’ll see many new jobs being created beyond our today’s comprehension. Even the universities, including Brac University, that we know of today may take a very different form. And I am sure that Bangladesh will go through transformation, voluntarily or involuntarily, moving beyond the garment industry.
Maybe I can use a short example to illustrate, although the example was not within the last 30 years. In the 19th century through the early 20th century, people hunted whales for their oil, not their meat. The whale oil was in big demand and was used to light up the cities and homes. The price of a barrel of whale oil was $1,200 in today’s price, compared with $80 per barrel of crude oil today. Whale oil was expensive and a key source of energy. Herman Melville, an American author, wrote a novel called Moby-Dick which was set against such a backdrop.
There was a story in a movie a few years ago. In it, before Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, he interviewed an old sailor of a whale ship. At the end of the interview, the old sailor said: “You know, I heard a man from Pennsylvania drilled a hole in the ground recently and found oil. That can't be true.”Herman Melville replied, “I heard it, too.”The old sailor then said with disbelief, “Oil from the ground? Fancy that!”
Yes, fancy that. It’s hard for the old sailor to believe that oil could come from ground. But it did. And the new oil industry replaced the entire whaling industry in no time.
There are other phenomena associated with a VUCA world, such as:people will tend to change jobs more frequently, develop multiple lines of career, and have varieties of unconventional career paths. Additionally, people are expected to live longer, perhaps up to 100 years and may have to work till 70 or 80 -- that’s more than 50 years of work after a typical bachelor degree is earned.
Navigating VUCA
Back to the inquiries from students and parents about jobs and career.
Keep in mind that you’ll have to navigate the VUCA world, you may build multiple, unconventional career paths, and you may work until 70.
Here is my suggestion: do what you like, follow your interest, your heart’s calling; be adaptive, flexible, and curious; be committed to lifelong learning; and whatever you do, do it with full integrity. I am not going to go into details to explain why. I’ll do so at another time.
In other words, a preferred career is something that you like, or better, you love; that makes your heart click, makes you jump out of your bed every morning and look forward to it; and that should be uniquely yours. So, you may be able to better navigate in the VUCA world and stay for long.
To take a step further, if you dare, if you are willing to take risks, you may be able to create the future, which is perhaps the best way of predicting the future. Create, not predict. Create, instead of predict.
Again, if you follow your heart’s calling, be curious and learning, you may be able to create the future, if you dare.
One of theaters I frequent in London is called ‘The Old Vic’. It’s 200 years old, located in the South Bank, right next to the Waterloo Train Station. Every time I go there, I’m always awed by the neon sign that hangs at the entrance. It reads -- “dare always dare”.
Treasure in the University
And my dear students, that’s the Brac University experience I’d like to create for you, if possible.
To help you find your calling, so you can be truer to self, be kinder to people, and be more curious about the world. And ultimately to help you navigate a world that is uncertain, unpredictable and full of unknowns, and if possible, dare the VUCA world and create the future.
In Brac University, we have been working on programs to define our student life.
We’ve been working on our General Education to help you broaden your exposure. It will help you explore your interests. The truth is that whether you study mathematics or humanities, business or history, pharmacy or design, computer or law, there would unlikely be a big difference in the long run in a VUCA world. In fact, I wish you could study all of them, if possible. If you read Apple’s founder Steve Jobs’ stories, you will learn that many of the design ideas of iPhone came from his ‘useless’ calligraphy class.
We’ve been working on the Duke of Edinburgh scheme; together with the Residential Semester, it will help you expand your comfort zone and develop your leadership skills. We’ve been working on the BRAC Immersive program, through which, I hope, you will learn to appreciate how environmental constraints can limit an individual’s opportunities. It will help you become a kinder, more empathetic person.
We’ve been working on various international exchanges and collaborations, so you can appreciate different views, gain global prospective and understanding. We currently have joint programs in economics, business, and pharmacy with universities in the US, UK and Australia. We’ll be continuing adding more exchange opportunities.
Of course, we are working on building our career development and placement capability. And we will be working on adding many more programs to improve and enhance our student life.
In short, we are working to make BU’s student life a rewarding experience that may help prepare you for your life’s journey. We will make BU a treasure island. But you must earn the treasure by yourself, sweat for it with your own time and efforts.
It’d be a pity that four years later, you’d leave this treasure island empty-handed, or empty-hearted or empty-headed. I wish you that four years later when you graduate from BU, you’d have more than a mere piece of your diploma.
Again, welcome to BU 2.0, a treasure island where all the treasures are meant to be discovered.
Treasures in the University? Fancy that!