gent sejko : commencement address for economics graduates at university of tirana commencement address by mr gent sejko, governor of the bank of albania, at the graduation ceremony of the students of economics, university of tirana, tirana, 7 october 2018. * * * honourable prof. kule, distinguished members of the faculty, dear family and friends, most importantly dear students, it is a privilege for me to be present today in this youthful and meaningful graduation ceremony. today, you, your families and your professors at the faculty of economics have earned the right to proud for this milestone achievement. i take this opportunity to extend my most sincere congratulations to all of you for the successful completion of your university studies. this moment marks an important transition in your life. you leave the university auditoriums to enter another reality, far different from the one you have experienced till now. from tomorrow, you will face a new dimension of the human reality, a rather dynamic and complex one. as you embark on a new journey, remember that life has many stations. every time you reach one of them, the next one might be even more challenging. it is part of the journey. remember, building a successful career takes time, hard work and perseverance. my advice is to make the first steps with the energy and enthusiasm that characterise your age. be courageously free of any complexity and non - based hesitation! pass through your positive energy whenever you are : in family, work, friends and daily relations with your colleagues. show consistent and cultured behaviour, as well as respect for the law, codes and traditions! embrace innovation and fight to make a reality any dream that inspires human love, prosperity, integrity and understanding. be loyal and collaborative, and never ever give up on learning and education, for whatsoever reason. nowadays, the society is facing many social, cultural, scientific, technological, demographic and geographical changes. the ability to adapt continuously and anticipate these developments is not simply a challenge of today. it shows the need to be constantly in touch with knowledge, new scientific novelties, innovation, and various theoretical trends and their application. therefore, i strongly encourage you to never break up with knowledge and education. be assured that, wherever you may be, in albania or abroad, education will always pay you back the energy and time you have spent. personally, i consider it as an important pillar, which helps over time to shape a reputable, respected and broadly accepted figure by

management to discover itself so dependent on inefficient and obsolescent equipment, and many are now moving rapidly to rectify this condition. other nations, who began to automate more recently, never amassed the vast inventory of these older systems that required so much remedial work in our country. the newer systems, which many put in place over the last few years, were more standard and better documented, thus easier to check out and fix. in many cases, after a few operations checked out such a system and discovered it was either all right or could be easily fixed and how to do it, the word got around, and many others with the same installation were saved a lot of trouble. then, in other places, only very new off - the - shelf software was being used. these were generally first efforts at automation in emerging areas. most software vendors developed simple fixes for their products and put them up on their web sites for anyone to employ. you may have seen the report from jamaica, where a very small group of knowledgeable technicians apparently fixed virtually every public and large private computer system in the entire nation in just a few months by simply following instructions available on the internet. it was, of course, overwhelmingly us companies that provided that free know - how. finally, there are shockingly many nations that had little to do because there simply are very few computers there. as we sat in the fed control room on 31 december and watched time zone after time zone roll through the millennium problem free, we got increasingly nervous. we better not have a problem here after all the very visible work and all the international preaching we had been doing for so long! that would be a major embarrassment! but all went well. what implications may this experience have for us? we are still much too close to the event to have adequately identified all that happened, let alone comprehensively assess its impact on the future. but let me offer a few speculations. first, in the short term. many foreigners are discreetly, but audibly, crowing about how we in the united states were so obsessed and spent so much money on y2k while they had equally good results and were much more relaxed about it. i am convinced that we will have the last laugh. as a result of that so - called obsession, i believe we have strengthened the underpinnings of our already impressive level of productivity improvement. among larger companies and public institutions, there is a new awareness in