First Technical University, Ibadan Chancellor, Chief Tunde Afolabi lists nuggets for success

First Technical University, Ibadan, Saturday, held its maiden convocation ceremony at its permanent site Campus on the Lagos Ibadan Expressway, with its Chancellor, Chief Tunde J Afolabi, urging the graduands to frontally face the challenges of life by being passionate in the pursuit of their dreams and painstaking in planning.

Afolabi, who is also the Executive Chairman of Amni International Petroleum Development Company Limited, told the graduands that great accomplishments happen through generation of ideas, which are concretised and brought to reality through planning.

“You must be able to plan. You must have daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, short term, medium-term, long-term plans. When you plan, you mitigate failure, when you fail to plan, as they say, you plan to fail,” he said.

The fuel for achieving such plans, according to the corporate icon, are: “discipline, hard work, dedication and consistency of purpose.”

The High Chief who holds the traditional titles of Akogun of Yorubaland and Parakoyi of Ibadanland, counseled the graduands to be prepared to take initiatives and think out of the box if they must be successful in their life pursuits.

“A lot of issues that will confront you will require that you are not afraid to go outside the box. You have to, a lot of times, think outside the box. You have to have initiative, creativity, boldness, courage and resilience to take risks and to overcome fear. Fear is an albatross and you must learn to defeat fear this early part of your journey.”

He then urged the new graduates to identify their latent talents and to express such talents by bringing them to life. To realise such talents, he posited, the young men and women graduating must be ready to leave the comfort zones and take risk.

The first set of students to graduate from the university were sixty three in all, with 12 graduating with First Class and 25 with Second Class Uppper divisions. All the graduating students graduated with three certificates: B.Sc in their Courses of Study, a Diploma in Vocational Entrepreneurship Studies and a Diploma in French Language, in line with the school’s ideology and credo: developing brains, training hands.