2022 Graduation Ceremony: AgroParisTech Position Paper
May 12 2022As a higher education and research institution, the vocation of AgroParisTech is to educate, research, innovate, share, and disseminate knowledge. We train engineers specializing in Life Sciences, who are required to navigate complexity and whose careers involve imagining, designing, and deploying solutions. As such, we are firmly rooted in a constructive approach, and we believe that solutions reside in scientific and technological progress and the way they are applied.
We want to contribute to finding answers to the challenges posed by global change and threats to biodiversity, as well as solutions to help ensure that everyone has access to adequate, healthy, and sustainable food.
Because a single, one-size-fits-all solution to these issues does not (and cannot) exist, we expose our students to a wide variety of viewpoints and to a necessarily diverse panorama of solutions that can be found and deployed in the fields of farming, nutrition, forests, regions, and the environment.
As such, the wide range of points of view shared during the 3-hour graduation ceremony came as no surprise to us, as they simply expressed the vast scope of the controversies associated with the subjects taught at AgroParisTech. Some of our graduates work in research or in farming cooperatives, while others are starting out as farmers, joining agri-businesses of all sizes, launching startups, implementing public policies for the transitions of the future, working in the fields of healthcare and human nutrition, managing and protecting natural and forest environments, or working on the recovery of biomass from waste products.
An event organized by our graduates, the ceremony showed that our institution is fulfilling its mission in helping our students orient their studies and career paths. Speeches from these eight graduates, along with many more from classmates who have chosen other paths, confirmed that an AgroParisTech education lies at the heart of current societal challenges and debates. This is truer than ever.