A special guest touched down to give a commencement address Tuesday to the University of Waterloo’s first group of graduates this spring.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield addressed graduating students from the school’s faculty of applied health sciences.

Hadfield – who was also presented with an honorary doctorate by the school – became in 2013 the first Canadian to command the International Space Station.

Returning to Earth, he is in the first year of a three-year contract with the University of Waterloo as a professor of aviation.

But on Tuesday, Hadfield was more interested in talking about “the people that earned it” than about what led to his own new degree.

“Today didn’t happen by accident,” he told the graduates.

“You don’t get an incompetent person sitting in a spaceship, and you don’t get an incompetent person sitting in the rows of (graduating) students.”

Hadfield told the grads that, just like his astronaut career, their degree was the product of a conscious decision made at one point in their lives and several years of hard work as a result of that decision.

“You have given yourself a set of skills that, by their very definition, require you to take leadership,” he said.

The professorship isn’t Chris Hadfield’s first role at Waterloo – he also undertook post-graduate studies at the school in 1982.