4 September 2002 'Confidence factor' gives edge to Lincoln graduates

As former Lincoln student and Commonwealth Secretary General Don McKinnon has said – you come across Lincoln graduates all over the world, in every walk of life. He's forever coming across them, he says, from the plains of Africa to the financial heart of New York, from tropical Asia to the bureaucracies of Europe.

"Lincoln stamps you with a certain confidence," says PhD graduate Hamish Gow, typical of the sort of person Don McKinnon is referring to. "It gives you an intellectual confidence that you can get out there and foot it with anyone."

Hamish himself is "footing it" successfully at the University of Illinois in the United States as an Assistant Professor in International Agribusiness Management and he's got a number of Lincoln graduates working alongside him there doing postgraduate research.

In science and the biosciences, commerce and business, the environmental and design areas, and recreation, sport and tourism Lincoln University keeps on producing outstanding achievers. The four graduates featured in separate articles – Craig, Jude, Pablo and Theresa – are prime examples.

Of course good graduates reflect good teaching. As Craig Hegan says of his time at Lincoln – "the standard of teaching was high".

That was in the Commerce and Business area. In science and the biosciences watch for names such as Professor Alison Stewart, an award winning researcher and teacher at the forefront of science in her area of plant pathology and the biological control of plant diseases.

Watch too for scientists such as molecular biologist Dr Jon Hickford, leader of the scientific team which has given farmers an answer to the costly problem of foot rot in sheep and is now hard at work on solving the mastitis problem in dairy cows.

In the environmental areas Lincoln has former Environment Court Judge, Peter Skelton, on the staff as an Associate Professor specialising in teaching Resource Management Act law and other aspects of the statutory side of environmental and resource management issues.

In Design, Lincoln pioneered the tertiary teaching of Landscape Architecture in New Zealand. The University has "seeded" the profession in this country and its Professor of Landscape Architecture, Cambridge graduate Simon Swaffield, was New Zealand’s first Professor of Landscape Architecture, an appointment which stamped the University's mark on the field both here and internationally.

And in Recreation, Sport and Tourism Lincoln again was first off the mark and has contributed much to "seeding" these areas with graduates and diplomates. As with Landscape Architecture, it was first in New Zealand with a professorial chair in tourism and Professor David Simmons has established himself as a respected leader in this field both in New Zealand and internationally.

If a university is known by the quality of its graduates, that quality starts with its teachers.

Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand.