DOI: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3181a445f0
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PMID: 19474551
Issn Print: 1040-2446
Publication Date: 2009/06/01
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Excerpt
I dread graduation. Not because I’m going to miss the medical students or the end of another year of teaching. It’s nothing so noble. It’s because I anticipate sitting in the hot faculty section while people on stage blather on with the kind of self-congratulatory glee that drives me crazy.
It starts with the seemingly impossible task of finding parking. Then the long walk to the massive auditorium. I enter through the backdoor, wander around backstage, and locate the handwritten note advising me that College of Medicine faculty are to go up the stairs to the non-air-conditioned greenroom. The deans get their own dressing rooms downstairs, where the rooms are cool and there are cookies and bottled spritzers. I know this because last year I did the graduation address and was assigned a large plate of delectables, just in case I was brave enough to risk a diabetic coma before speaking.
When I arrive upstairs this year, most of my colleagues are already adorned in robes and hoods bright enough to attract mates. I find and put on my gown, my hood, and my floppy hat, which was undoubtedly trendy and the rage at some piazza in ad 1014. Why do I need a hood if I’m already wearing a hat? I say to my nearest colleague, who shrugs. Were ancient scholars so afraid of rain?
Then it’s time. We descend stairs and wind back through the stage and outside. We line up and come down the aisles in front of the families and friends of the graduates and take our seats near the front. In our gowns, it is already hot near the blazing lights.
The place erupts. Flashes pop, as if we are at the Final Four, and then through the haze and roar I watch 120 smiling medical students come down the aisle behind us, frantically waving to families.
We sit through the speeches, time drags, we faculty sweat—and then it’s time for the students to cross the stage. At our medical school, our students select someone to “hood” them, marking the moment when they become physicians in our eyes. Grandmothers, uncles, brothers, wives, husbands, fathers, and mothers come out from behind the curtain, one student at a time, surprised by the brightness of the lights and the sea of faces stretching out to the far walls, and tearfully hood their young doctors.
And sitting there, like every year, I can’t help but think of how these hooders wiped noses and scratched heights in pencil on the walls and checked backpacks and admonished the students to study harder and took on extra jobs, and all at once I’m overwhelmed by the thousands of sacrifices represented here—all so that these kids could walk across the stage and, soon, across our wards—and suddenly I am so glad to be here, so honored to be a small cog in this enormous wheel producing the next generation of physicians. Better physicians. Great physicians.
When it’s over I wipe my eyes and return upstairs. I gently hang my gown and hood inside their plastic for next year, when I’ll likely make the same mistake again, grumbling and moaning the whole way down to the seats beneath the hot lights.
