Summer Issue, 2013

You would miss your friends here; you would miss the close bonding of your classmates and from here during this period will emerge your most unforgettable lifetime friends. And you need to travel with them. In doing so, you all can go farther. Do not try to take the short-cut; do not try to take the plain road all the time. And the reason why I am warning you this is - there is a danger for you to follow a prescribed, formulated path. The American poet Robert Frost said: “Two roads diverged in a wood. I took the one less travelled by. And that has made all the difference.” In travelling, never be afraid to take risks and make mistakes. You know, failure is the prerequisite for success. If you are so afraid of failing, you are a failure by default. In the last five years of my being here, I wish I could persuade some of you to do the soul searching and ask those imponderable questions - Who am I? Why am I doing what I am doing? Where am I going? - and to seek your path and find your bliss. And if just one of you can do that, then I will regard that all my wanderings but to come home here, and all the wearies and toils of my career would not have been in vain. Interlude What is in a name? My name is Lee Sum-Ping. When I went overseas, my name became Sum P Lee (or SP Lee). When I returned, some of you then called me Sam, Shum and Zoom. Some of you addressed me as Professor Sump and Splee; and thinking that I was Sleepless in Seattle and that now I can sleep in Hong Kong you called me Professor Sleep. Some added an “n” and I became Professor Spleen. Well, I am a gastroenterologist. At least, it is in the abdomen. The ingenuity of Cantonese made it that I was called Ah Sum, Ah Sum 哥 , Ah Sum 叔 and most interestingly still, I was called Ah Dean- you know, the crazy one. A bed of roses How about the Faculty? There are some personalities who can be prickly. There is the occasionally one or two who suffer from mental constipation and compensate it with verbal diarrhoea. But on the whole I think they are just terrific. The Faculty has the most intelligent, hardworking, committed and devoted workers. I just feel that they are a very special breed of human beings and I have been so lucky to work with them. The Faculty rocks. The Faculty will rock you and the Faculty will rock the world. Three-legged stool of Flexner: To heal. To seek. To teach The story now goes to research. We have reengineered and restructured the research enterprise and changed the paradigm from building disparate, fragmented silo-fiefdoms to bundling them into strong and cohesive forces. The Faculty now pursues thematic and programmatic research under the banners of Areas of Excellence, Themed-based Research, and the States Key Laboratory programmes. We have redefined the missions of the Faculty by recognising equally the merits of research, teaching and patient care. You can be recognised as a super hero - whether you are a super man, spider man, or wonder woman. We have redrawn the three-legged stool of Flexner. To heal, to seek and to teach are the three legs that will On Campus 18