So we looked back at our graduation ceremony from September 2018 because one speech was particularly memorable. Murdoch alumnus Dr Craig Challen was awarded an honorary degree for the key role he played in the rescue of 12 children and their football coach trapped in a Thai cave. His efforts resulted in him receiving several awards, including 2019 Australian of the Year, alongside Dr Richard Harris.

Dr Challen shared his valuable insights to a captive audience back in September and we wanted to share them with you now.

1. Keep your mind and body healthy. The responsibility is nobody’s but your own and the value is self-evident.
2. Learn as much as you can about as many things as possible outside your specialist area of knowledge. You still need to develop your specialty; for most of you it will be the basis of your career, your income and your sense of identity. But the desperate shortage we face now is of generalists that are able to bridge many areas of knowledge to provide leadership during a crisis.
3. Dealing with adversity can be trained for just as much as can strength and speed. Accustom yourself to small difficulties in order to prepare for big ones. Every single day brings challenges, confront them with all you’ve got and use them as an opportunity to build yourself.
4. Do hard things. Expect a certain amount of failure in things you attempt - if you’re not failing half of what you try then you’re not stretching your goals. Obviously this must be tempered by the nature of the activity you’re engaged in: if you’re a neurosurgeon please don’t accept a 50 per cent failure rate. But you need to continuously challenge yourself to advance, and you also need to accustom yourself to small failures in order to build the mental strength and resilience needed to carry on in times of adversity. I don’t recall anyone ever saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”.
5. Do not routinely evade discomfort and inconvenience. Accepting them will build tolerance and the capacity to distinguish unimportant obstacles from those requiring your full attention. Most of all, this means exposing yourself to the discomfort and inconvenience of challenging your own thinking and exposing yourself to conflicting points of view.

One of the benefits of university is being surrounded by so many people with different experiences, viewpoints and unique ways of thinking, each with their own story to tell. Explore more stories here.