Dear Students,
I am very pleased to welcome you to SMU and to the School of Social Sciences.
It is especially gratifying to know that, when you join us, we will be ready to greet you in person and to enable you to engage with friends and colleagues in actual rather than virtual communities. The past few years have been challenging ones, but we hope that the efforts and sacrifices we have made have put us in a stronger position to continue our mission.
That mission is, quite simply, to help our students acquire an excellent education. We are confident that we are well prepared to do just that and that our own enthusiasm will be matched by that of the newest members of our learning community.
I am confident that, once you begin life at SMU, you will find this to be a vibrant and exciting campus as well as an engaging and even inspiring centre for study and intellectual inquiry more broadly. I anticipate that you will join clubs and societies, form enduring friendships, and through your studies as well as your extra-curricular activities, discover what you are best at, learn how you can make a difference to the world, and decide who it is you want to become.
We look forward to sharing the next four years with you but hope you will come to feel that this is just the beginning of a life-long connection.
Professor Chandran KUKATHAS
Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Political Science and Dean
School of Social Sciences