BY Nkosazana Ngwadla
Wits University awarded Dr David Fine an honorary degree at the Faculty of Science graduation ceremony on 17 April 2023.
“The last time I was in this Hall was 59 years ago, when I received my BSc Honours degree, second-class, in chemistry. That was before all you graduates were born. It was before even most of your parents were born, so I feel it’s appropriate for me to mention some of the lessons that learnt that I wish I’d known very much earlier,” said Fine, after congratulating all graduands and “especially to those who are first in their family to receive a university degree”.
The first lesson, Fine said, was in solving tough technical problems, “If you’re an expert, it blocks a lot of your innovative thinking. You want to be the beginner. So, the right way to solve the problem is to read about it just enough to understand. No more. Stop. Then think of all the possible solutions.”
Lesson two is the realisiation that you’re going to get push-back. “When you have new ideas, people very often don’t understand what you’ve done or don’t believe what you’ve done,” said Fine.
Lesson three: The importance of chance – “We all meet our spouses and our lovers by pure chance, by pure accident, serendipity. That’s a very powerful tool. If it works so well in our personal lives, I started to use it in science as well,” said Fine.
Lesson four is to thrive on failure. Fine cautioned the graduands: “When everything works when you’re a scientist, when everything’s going great, and you’ve had no failures for a while … beware of getting in trouble. And I say that very seriously, because you’re not pushing the limits of your mind, you’re not pushing the limits of your knowledge. You have to have failure. Failure is how you learn. You have to enjoy failure, thrive on failure, because that’s how you jump to the next level.”
