I can’t help but feel overwhelmed with joy and gratitude. Joy and gratitude for the ability to gather together today in person as a community, to celebrate one another, when just a couple of years ago, we would have been physically distanced from each other, unable to feel the connection through a wave to an old classmate, a handshake exchanged with faculty or a hug from our loved ones.
These past four years have been some of the most impactful yet challenging years of our lives. It seems like yesterday that we were walking into the double doors of the SEC Auditorium on a hot July day, anxiously awaiting to dive into medical school, meet our professors and build lasting, lifelong friendships with our classmates.
During our pre-clinical years, our class tackled 130 exams (yes, I went back to count). We navigated the waters of being medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic, having to pivot to a completely virtual learning environment and face many tiring study days isolated in our homes, alone.
We have served our global communities as hardworking students on clinical rotations. We have experienced many “firsts,” like watching new life be born into the world or seeing a patient code and not make it. Perhaps it was our first time being a part of difficult end-of-life conversations, holding the hand of someone that really needed it, working a 24-hour shift, or advocating for a patient like our lives depended on it.
To my classmates: Thank you for the endless contributions each of you made to this class. We worked together and supported one another through endless study days, exams and even a global pandemic. I have never been so proud to be a part of such an incredible group of people, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn alongside each of you.
To our faculty: Thank you for always keeping your doors open and assisting us when we needed extra help. Your innovative, captivating and unique teaching styles aided in our ability to build upon our basic science and clinical knowledge, preparing us to tackle our first rounds of licensure examinations.
To our family and friends: Thank you for being there for every step of this journey. For picking up that phone call when we needed to hear your voice telling us everything was going to be okay. Thank you for supporting our dream and believing we could accomplish anything we set our minds to. Thank you for the grace you gave us and for never giving up on us.
Tomorrow, classmates and friends, we become doctors. What a beautiful gift we have been given. May we always lift one another up, bring positivity to our future health care teams, provide the highest quality of care to all people and remember this incredible institution that gave us our shot of fulfilling our collective dream to become a doctor.
