Vice-Chancellor's Welcome Address

Remarks by Dr. Nancy Dye on the arrival of students at the Access Academy in Chittagong, delivered on March 30, 2008.

Welcome all at this beginning of the first year of the Access Academy. Now I want to talk to your first class of students: the Access Academy Class of 2009.

All of your teachers and the entire staff of the Asian University for Women are very excited and pleased that you are here. All of us give your our warmest welcome! Your teachers are also new to the Access Academy and most are new to Bangladesh. Let’s give them a round of applause.

Each of you is now a member of a very special academic community dedicated to creating educational opportunity for women.

Our first goal at the Access Academy is to give each of you an excellent preparation for a university education. We hope that you, in turn, will make your first goal to successfully complete the Access Academy course over the next 16 months. Do not let anything change your determination to complete your education. We hope to welcome you into the first class of the Asian University for Women in September of 2009.

We are proud that you are our students. And already know something about you. We met our Cambodian students on Youtube a few weeks ago! We also know that you are fine students. You have won places here through a rigorous competition throughout the region: more than 1,200 students applied for admission to the Access Academy. We know that each of you has the academic ability, the desire to learn, the intellectual curiosity, and the leadership potential to succeed here at the Access Academy and beyond.

We are also proud of you for completing the journeys that brought you here. Whether your journey began in Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or right here in Chittagong. These journeys were hard.

For most of you this is the first time you are living away from home. Many of you may have taken your first trip outside your home country and your first plane flight. Some of you had frustrating visa problems. But all of you persevered.

Your journeys to the Access Academy tell us that you are women of courage and that you have the spirit of adventure. Your determination to get here despite frustration and difficulty makes us confident that you will take on hard academic challenges – such as mastering the English language – and not give up.

And we know that you are open to learning more about the world by choosing to live in an academic community that welcomes women from many cultures, social backgrounds, and religions. Through conversation and friendship you will learn much from your classmates. Much of education is about learning how to live together.

I think of each of you as a pioneer, because you are willing to be the first to go to a new and unfamiliar place and the first to explore new ideas.

As pioneers you will play a central role in building the Access Academy. You might think that only teachers and principals build schools, but this is not true. No school can be great without involving its students. We will learn much from you about what the Access Academy and the Asian University for Women can and should be. Because this is a new school, the Access Academy is a work in progress. It needs every one of our students’ ideas, opinions and participation. Throughout your lives, you can take pride that you played a major role in building a great educational institution. Again, welcome to our first class – the pioneers.