Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Tomorrow will be the first time you wake up as doctors, unless of course some of you fall
asleep during this ceremony...
But you will not be medical doctors, like me and those who came before you. Tomorrow
you will be doctors of your specialty.
As the first graduating class since many LCME-accredited schools ceased to offer the M.D. degree, you
will truly be the doctors of tomorrow.
I'm confident that you have the traditional knowledge of physiology and the other basic sciences, the technical expertise
of engineers and the humanity of your M.D. predecessors.
Your competency-based medical education allowed you to progress at your own pace, mastering
every skill you needed to know before moving on, many of you completing your specialty
graduate program in only two and a half years.
Specialty testing allowed you to hone your natural talents and abilities and focus your
training on the best track suited for each of you individually—though I know some of
you changed course once or twice along the way.
The interdisciplinary emphasis of your schooling taught you to work in teams like never before,
utilizing the skills of the group to be more efficient and effective in patient care.
The residencies you have all secured and physician shortages you are bringing to an end are proof
enough. As specialists moving on to obstetrics and population genomics, to cardiology and
geriatrics, I have no doubt that you, as the next generation of health care providers,
will serve us all for the duration of our lives.
Graduates of 2033: with you we say goodbye to the doctor of medicine, or M.D. degree.
And we welcome the world of doctors of pediatrics, doctors of holographic radiology, doctors
of internal artificial medicine and personalized pharmocogenomics, and many other disciplines.
I know we are in the right hands.