I went all the way to Israel only to find myself at home.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne invited me, along with Malcolm Campbell, U of G’s vice-president (research), on a provincial life sciences trade mission to Israel in May. Malcolm Campbell, U of G’s vice-president (research), also attended.
While there, I signed a cooperation agreement with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to pursue faculty and student exchanges, and to undertake joint research projects and conferences.
And I met U of G alumnus Ido Schechter, who completed his graduate studies at the Ontario Agricultural College. He now runs Agrinnovation, which commercializes technologies from research in Hebrew University’s Faculty of Agriculture.
Schechter’s roots are entwined with those of the University of Guelph. By helping to find real-world applications for food, agricultural and veterinary research, he’s grounded in nearly 150 years’ worth of U of G tradition.
And he’s not alone.
Schechter is one of more than 122,000 Guelph alumni living in Canada and 149 countries around the world. Each of those graduates, including the class of 2016, became similarly grounded in this community.
During your time on campus, each of you took in that “Guelphiness,” that hard-to-define sense of community and shared heritage that identifies Guelph grads in the wider world, even decades after graduation.
From Israel to China to Toronto, wherever I go I find U of G. It’s a Guelph community and, at the same time, an “international community.”
Community grounds and strengthens us. That strength comes from shared purpose. It also comes from diversity. Among our nearly 28,000 students on campuses in Guelph, Ridgetown and Toronto, some 1,200 international students arrive from more than 100 countries.
We maintain that strength — that sense of shared community purpose — wherever you find yourself, at home in the world as a Guelph grad.
Franco Vaccarino
President and Vice-Chancellor