The buzz is back.  The new students are here.  All is back to normal. I don't like the atmosphere of the quiet months of July (except for graduation week) and August as much as the feeling on campus today. And I know that feeling will grow stronger over the coming days as more second, third and fourth year undergraduates arrive back for the re-start of teaching next Monday.  A university without students is like a concert-hall without the audience.  The orchestra may be there to rehearse and play, and even to be recorded, but there is no one to hear them directly.

Today, along with Andrew West from Student Services and Josh Forstenzer from the Union of Students, I spoke to four groups of our new undergraduates - totalling over 5000 students.   They are setting out on what should be an incredible voyage of discovery - about their subjects, about other people, but also about themselves.  I think we put that message across strongly to them - perhaps more strongly than we have in previous years.  They will graduate into a more difficult labour market than did the students of ten years ago. The global challenges they will face in their working lives are arguably growing year by year.  What we tried to do today was to present to the new students a vision of our university as a place that will support their endeavours to become different, that will give them the opportunities to explore and to grow, and that will present them with challenges but not in such a way as to leave them without advice and guidance.

Only time will tell whether we did a good job today.  I speak to a lot of big audiences, and as anyone who does so knows, one develops certain ways of detecting the mood of the group.  Today I sensed that this year's new entrants are perhaps more serious and attentive than those of some recent years.  They perhaps recognise some of the difficulties that the country is facing, and that beset the wider world at large.  There seemed to be a different mood around, and I will be interested in the coming months to see whether I have actually totally mis-read them, or whether this cohort has a more reflective and determined approach to making the most of its time with us.

I found a similar level of seriousness last Friday evening at what is always, to me, one of the highlights of my year - the dinner that rounds off the orientation week for international students.  In my blog for the end of graduation week in July I wrote of the privilege of working amongst gifted and idealistic young people.  The dinner on Friday also gives me a kick because of the way in which it brings together students from every continent of the world: as I go round the tables and talk to many of those present I reflect that nowhere else can I have conversations, within a very few minutes, with students from India (from the city where my father was stationed during the second world war), Germany (including a student who told me she is a distant relative of the pope), Finland (with a student who corrected me on my pronunciation of 'welcome' in Finnish in my opening remarks), Australia (a student who told me about life in the most isolated big city in the world - Perth), and the Netherlands (a student who told me about his enthusiasm for the postgraduate programme he is to take in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities).  But on Friday evening, just as today, I found a serious, diligent, committed and responsible attitude prevalent in the company at large.

It is a privilege to have the students back with us, and it is going to be an enthralling year if this spirit of commitment that I have detected so far actually continues throughout the  coming months and years that the new cohort will be with us.