Dear students,

Dear colleagues,

            Welcome to the academic year 2022 - 2023! A year that we all wish good and full of achievements. A year that will offer us fewer hardships and more beautiful challenges, that will help us to develop without constraints independent of our will and choices.

We are all here today because, whatever our motivation, we have all chosen to pursue medical professions and beyond that, we have chosen that our paths cross. My colleagues and I have chosen to be teachers and you, the students, have chosen us, the academics, to be your mentors. Thank you for your vote of confidence and we will try to live up to your expectations.

The University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Craiova is not only an institution that trains health specialists, it is a place where, we like to say, first and foremost characters are formed!

             Dear colleagues,

I do not want to talk to you about our mission as teachers, about the responsibility we have towards the future. You know, we know what we have to do! We have already proven it in previous years, when the educational paradigm was restructured. We have learned to adapt and that has given us strength. A strength that if managed correctly can help us to be the trainers the future needs.

             Dear students,

you are the future! We are responsible for your training, but you alone are responsible for what you are to become. You don't have easy choices to make, but if you wanted it to be easy, you would not choose a health profession! Remember that it is only at university that your professional identity begins to take shape. The medical profession is hard... Why? Because we work with the unknown. How? I will answer with a quote from Voltaire, who said that doctors are those specialists who "prescribe medicines about which they know very little, in order to cure diseases about which they know even less, of human beings they know nothing about!"

           It is hard to work in health, but it is nice! And unless you have learned it by now, at least you guess... Otherwise, we would not be in this room together today!

           Succinctly, as Rector and academic, I wish for an university year in which teachers and students evolve together, in which we capitalize on what we have gained from past experiences and live new experiences from which we will benefit for the future!

Good luck to all!

Professor PhD Dan-Ionuț GHEONEA,

Rector

University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Craiova