- [President Kim] I didn't come here to be a president.
I came here to be more effective
at making the world a better place.
And you can believe that that's how
I'm going to run this presidency.
As I meet the students and as I meet the faculty,
I'm even more sure that we, as a community,
are gonna take on the most difficult problems,
and as John Sloan Dickey said,
"Make the world's troubles our troubles."
- [Woman] Thank you so much.
- [Woman] Thank you, Mary.
- [Woman] Thank you.
- My whole life has been spent
going into organizations saying,
"What are we doing now?"
and then asking questions.
So what are your greatest aspirations?
If you could make this institution
into whatever it is that you wanted
and shoot for the moon, what would that be?
And then, when they tell me their greatest aspirations,
we kind of add 20% on to that.
I am gonna wake up early,
and I hope to see
the early late third shift
and early first shift people
all the time, and I hope to work as hard
as you all do,
and I hope that we can find among us
just the right kind of aspirations
that will make us wake up every morning
and feel excited about what we're doing.
- So that's in this particular space.
- Hi Jen, good to meet you.
- I'm Morgan.
- Hi Morgan, good to meet you.
- And this is Wei Xi.
- Hi Wei, how are you?
- Look in there and we actually have some protein crystals,
which hopefully you can see.
- I know the great programs in the world
who are very good at treating.
- Yeah.
- But if you could use this.
- Yeah.
- I could link you up to people right now
who could try this, because it's a natural product.
- Well that's what we need.
- Bangladesh is a good place to do it.
- Mm hmm.
- Simple solution, I mean I know the people
who make the salts.
What if we just tried that
in a randomized group of people,
and we go back and look at say,
"What were their outcomes?"
- Exactly what we'd like to try.
- This is fun.
(laughter)
How you doing?
Now as I toured the facility here today,
I kept thinking, "Oh my gosh."
Every student should have the experience
of some of these classes,
and to learn how to think with their brain,
their left brain, if you will,
doing the calculations and doing the analysis,
but then also think visually
to see how things actually come together.
- Thanks very much.
- I'd love to come back and learn more.
- Thank you.
- Nice to meet you, thank you for your time.
- Nice to meet you.
- These guys are terrific, by the way.
- It's just something about competition,
being with others, working together,
something that was just incredibly addictive.
And then when I started traveling to Africa and Haiti
and other places, it was more difficult,
but the lessons from athletics and sports
have stayed with me,
and I think that they are critical lessons.
And I consider what you do to be a critical part
of the growth and education of our students.
My job is to take away obstacles
for you to do what you need to do
to not only win games,
but create those leaders who are gonna take on
all these other problems,
and take the lessons from your coaching with them
on for the rest of their lives.
- Mechanisms or immunotherapy,
or epidemiology, cancer control.
Those are the kinds of areas
in which we gather people together
to do their science
and also to, we hope, impact on the community.
- If you look at our most cherished social goals,
health, education,
social welfare, environmental sustainability,
if we begin to pay more attention
to the science of execution
around our most cherished social values,
we could start a revolution.
It's an idea that I've come to think is within our reach.
The people here know more about what
it means to build a good healthcare system
than any other people in the world.
And I congratulate you for being at the cutting edge
of what is going to be, I think,
the most important and influential field of study
in the field of medicine very soon.
You now understand how important
I think what you teach is.
Not just for the people who are going into business,
but for anyone who wants to accomplish anything
with a complex group of people.
- We have that other meeting now.
- My hope is that you're gonna watch,
with your business school eye,
at a new leader
trying to lead an institution.
I don't think that single individuals
can change the world.
But I think that thousands of young people
unleashed on the world with this great training,
with the sense that there's nothing they can't do,
that changes the world.
So I want to be good at that.
And I need your very direct and honest
assessments of how I'm doing as we go along.
(light instrumental music)
(jovial chatter)
I was convinced that if I could do a good job
at being the president of Dartmouth College,
we together as a community would do things
the likes of which the world has never seen.
So let me talk directly to the '11s that are here.
You know, I left my other job
and I did not take up other opportunities
because of my faith in all of you.
Now, I'm convinced that you will leave here
armed with all the tools to take on any problem
of any complexity.
But it doesn't matter to me what it is that you take on.
But I don't want you to leave here thinking,
"Well, I got a good education, but I'm not sure that
"I can really take on something as complicated
"as fill-in-the-blank."
My job is to convince you that your professors here,
and your classmates,
have prepared you more effectively
than any other institution in the world.
And if you guys don't take it up,
if you guys don't take on the hard problems,
throw your own bodies at them,
and bring them to submission,
nobody else will.
Because no one else is gonna be
as well prepared as you.
(audience applauds)