Madam President of the Board of Regents, Laura Acra
Members of the Board of Regents,
Members of the Academic Council and directors, teachers and collaborators of INTEC,
Guest speaker, María Victoria Menicucci,
Mr. Ambassador of Costa Rica, Honorable José Rafael Torres
Graduates and Graduates,
Family and related,
Ladies and Gentlemen

I have the honor to address you at the most important formal event of this university: the graduation ceremony. It is an act that we celebrate solemnly, but with great enthusiasm, because it symbolizes the transition of our students to professional life or to a new stage in it. As on every occasion, my main mission is to congratulate the male and female graduates, express my respect for the family members and those related who supported them during the journey, and thank the work of the professors who contributed their effort to help them achieve quality education.

I know very well, graduates and graduates, that this is a decisive day in the trajectory of each one of you, because as of today it is public knowledge that, in some cases, you have already acquired the necessary skills to exercise a profession or that, in other cases, they have already advanced to a higher level through postgraduate studies. It is natural for them to have a healthy sense of pride and an expectation of great future accomplishments.

Those expectations have been expressed very eloquently in the Mural that was recently enabled for each graduate to express, creatively and in a single sentence, their most important professional goal for the coming year. Thanks to that mural, I learned that the student with registration 10-0972 has plans to form his own company, that the student with registration 06-1036 imagines himself doing surgery in Brazil , and that license plate 09-0877 has his eye on getting a job at Google.

And, of course, there are other somewhat more ambitious plans. For example, a graduate with registration 04-0490 summed up his expectations in just three words (“Conquer the world”), while the 09-0734 graduate simply proposed “Build something great” - although he did not want to reveal details of his secret plan to achieve that end. I must confess, however, that among all the aspirations written on the mural, there was one that left me especially thoughtful, because it has a certain relationship with my own work. It is about the student with enrollment 06-1100, whose goal for one year from now is simply and simply ... "To be Rector of INTEC".

In reality, graduates and graduates, professional success is only part of the challenges that lie ahead. In a country like ours, burdened by immense needs and shameful inequalities, it is also important to ask yourself in what other ways you can contribute to improve the living conditions of other Dominicans and other Dominicans, to build a better society. Put in other words, it is our hope that each of you will grow without limits in your private life, but that at the same time you care about the growth of others.


The social contribution of each one is especially relevant at this time, when momentous changes are taking place in our society. The debate around the exploitation or non-exploitation of Loma Miranda, the controversy in relation to the Judgment of the Constitutional Court on the concept of nationality and the ongoing discussion on the reform of the Criminal Procedure Code are evidences of a boiling country, which seeks collective answers to problems that were not even addressed before. It is our appreciation that, regardless of the specific decisions adopted in each of these cases, the process itself is relevant, because it shows new forms of social participation that in the long run will end up building an improved form of democracy.

In this context, graduates and graduates, you have a great share of responsibility, as professionals and as citizens. Being a graduate of INTEC is a privilege that morally obliges you to contribute, with ideas and knowledge, to improving the living conditions of the entire society, and we hope that you will take up this challenge with the talent, creativity, responsibility and commitment that characterize our Hive. On our part, we will remain attentive to the trajectory of each one of you, and we hope to count on your support for our institutional challenge, which consists of being recognized, nationally and internationally, as a model of university, for our academic excellence, the quality of our processes and our contribution to the development of society.

Let me now introduce our guest speaker to you. María Victoria Menicucci Mella has a degree in Business Administration, and has excelled in the field of business and service leadership. For more than 16 years she was a member of the Board of Directors of the Santiago Chamber of Commerce and Production, and in 2010 she became the first woman to preside over this important institution. Similarly, in the period 2011-2012, he presided over the business federation FEDOCAMARAS.

Menicucci Mella was recognized as "Distinguished Lady of the city of Santiago in the Business Area" by the council of that town. He is currently a member of the Boards of Directors of PUCMM, ISA University and the Association for Development, Inc. (APEDI), and of the Plenary of the Economic and Social Council (CES).

In the private sphere, he chairs the Board of Directors of MENICUCCI-transforming spaces, and is an honorary member of the "Heart to Heart Foundation". Among his business and social concerns, his identification with persevering work stands out as a way to become a competitive and safe country that invests in education and creates the conditions for the emergence of a strengthened and educated middle class with democratic values.

For these and other reasons, it is an honor to have you at our graduation and I ask to welcome you with loud applause. Thank you very much.