University holds 2016 New Year Ceremony and Concert
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- Writer 커뮤니케이션팀
- 보도일자 2016-02-05
Our university's 2016 New Year Ceremony and Concert was held at the Centennial Hall Samsung Convention Center on January 4th. Celebrating the 110th anniversary, our university's professors, staff, student representatives, among others, greeted each other with a promise of fresh new start.
Chairman of Sookmyung Academy, Lee Don-hui, spoke about the importance of a democratic organization and educational organization through the New Year message. The Chairman quoted John Dewey and emphasized that "the most ideal organization is a democratic organization and a democratic organization is an educational organization, in other words, it is an organization that continuously grow and develop," and said, "I hope the members of our organization can maintain a good relationship with each other and work toward endless advancement."
Following the message from the Chairman, President Sunhye Hwang stepped up to the podium and delivered her message of thanks and hopes for all the countless past efforts from the Sookmyung members and announced her will to overcome the challenges that our university is currently facing. President Hwang said, "we need to seriously ask ourselves are we making continuous innovations rather than simply relying on our past tradition and achievements, are we producing essential value and knowledge which is the role of universities in our society, and have we educated our graduates to become virtuous pillars of the society," and she added, "I also couldn't help but to look back on my performance for the past three and a half years and ask myself how much I contemplated before making decisions on policies and how faithfully I had carried them out."
She emphasized that "the unemployment rate of young people which have exceeded 20% long ago is a too big of a problem to claim that universities are not employment training centers" and "our university must independently answer to the changing demands of the students who are our resources and we must make efforts to reduce the mismatch between supply of graduates and demand of corporations." In addition, she spoke about "the university's financial weakness due to 60% dependence on tuition, difficulties of obtaining external research funds and state funded projects due to high ratio of humanities, social, arts, music, and physical education bachelor programs," and because of this, "the school will face even bigger problems if we don't proactively respond to such issues and focus on protecting our vested rights."
Finally, President Hwang spoke about the challenges she will be focusing on during her remaining term. She said, "the College of Engineering that will be opening this year will become a turning point for breaking through the challenges of the changing times," and she will "give her best to attract large-scale government-funded projects such as PRIME projects by continuously expanding the engineering department." She also added "I will prepare a framework and contents for quality liberal education that we can be proud of at home and abroad by reorganizing our liberal education and establishing a college for basic liberal arts education."
The first part of the New Year Ceremony ended with the message from President Hwang and the following New Year Concert presented performance of Quartet Rêve ensemble consisting of an orchestra and graduate students. They lived up to our expectations as the champion ensemble team of the 2015 Osaka International Music Competition and gave a fantastic performance during the 20 minutes. They received fervent applause from the teaching staff as they played their fantastic repertoire of various genres such as "Elgar - Salut d'amour," "Canon," "Waltz by Shostakovich," and "Libertango by Piazzolla."
