"Five of my PhD students over the years have had babies during the time they were doing their PhD. So some of the photos I have with graduates are also with their babies or small kids!"
Business School lecturer, Professor Oscar Cacho, loves attending graduation and celebrating with his students - and their families, as pictured above with 2018 PhD graduate, Kara Tighe and her daughter, who she gave birth to during her studies. Hearing about career plans and meeting loved ones proves to be the icing on the cake for Oscar after guiding students throughout their study journey.
"I like meeting my students, it’s very satisfying," he said.
"The other thing that’s very nice is when you hear from them later on in their careers.
"Sometimes you run into them by chance or because you are collaborating with another organisation and they have a job there. In fact the other day it happened to me – I’m doing some work with DPI and one of our graduates from the Bachelor of Agricultural Economics is working there, so I met her again and it’s very pleasing to see (our graduates) getting jobs like that.
"We might even end up collaborating on a project, so you never know.
"Sometimes they get back to you with a question that they have about something they might be doing at work and they say, 'Oh I remember when we were learning about this … can I get your advice?', or sometimes they might just say, 'This stuff I learned has been very useful'.
"But it’s always nice to stay in touch with them – it’s also a way of networking.
"Because a lot of our students are externals, sometimes you get to meet them when they come to Armidale for intensive schools, but there are many students who don’t come to Armidale at all, do everything online – and then for graduation they come, and you get to put the face to the student.
"When you’re processing at the graduation ceremony, many times graduates will wave at you from their seats.
"When you finish with the ceremony very often we will just hang around and the students will come over and say hello, and they introduce their parents – sometimes you might even be invited to go join them for lunch later on.
"When you go through the whole process of guiding postgraduate students through their research, of course it’s always nice to go and celebrate with them.
"Sometimes you get to meet their families at the graduation too, so all that process of just celebrating together is very rewarding.
"Sometimes we get very bogged down on the academic side of things and of course we want our students to do well in their learning and have good academic records, but sometimes we forget that they have lives outside of uni, so it’s nice to meet them and learn a bit more about them and what their plans are."
UNE's 2019 Summer Round of graduation ceremonies are coming up in mid December. Dates for each of our faculties are as follows:
Thursday 12th Dec - Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education
Friday 13th Dec - Faculty of Medicine and Health
Saturday 14th Dec - Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law
