A very warm welcome to your new home away from home, Durban University Technology (DUT)!
Given social and other societal challenges families, especially young people, face, it must have been a herculean effort for you to make this next step in your journey of growth and development. Congratulations!
DUT has survived the decades since its establishment because of efforts of many who came before us. Their openness to learning, their excellence, their hard work, their research, scholarship and innovation, their generosity and philanthropy, their taxes and many other things that we should not take for granted, made it all possible for us all. The onerous obligation to be DUT stewards like our forebears were is now being passed on to you and your generation. How you apply yourself diligently to your studies, how you treat the environment, how you take care of DUT’s equipment and infrastructure and how you treat others around you, determine the kind of culture, prestige, reputation you will help to bestow on DUT for posterity. Please contribute towards creating an even greater DUT. Future generations count on it.
Some of you are on your own for the very first time in your lives; far away from your parents, your teachers, mentors and the communities that reared you. Use this opportunity to grow into the best version of yourself. Whilst your time at DUT will give you opportunities to develop, grow and explore, be on the lookout for opportunistic social maladies and trends that often entrap young people. Succumbing to them often makes them but shadows of themselves, regardless of their sterling performance and exemplary behaviour at their homes and schools.
You are joining us at an opportune moment. We are hard at work to rebuild DUT so that it can adequately prepare you to become adaptive graduates who will make a considerable impact in our communities and in the world at large. The ongoing review of our curricula, supported by the General Education we offer, will ensure that you exit DUT as all-round graduates ready to provide innovative solutions that will help make our region and our country great.
Never lose sight of the main purpose of your presence at DUT: to learn and to succeed academically, socially and in many other progressive pursuits. DUT has many support measures in place to assist you when you struggle. Make it your business to find out what they are, where they are, and how they are accessed.
I am DUT. You are DUT. We are DUT.
Welcome!
Pictured: Vice-chancellor and principal Professor Thandwa Mthembu.
