The amount of factual material to be presented to you in the next four years is, for practical purposes, infinite. Even eliminating your need for spouses, friends, family, recreation, hobbies, sleeping, eating, urination and defecation will not give you enough time to learn it all though some have tried. Therefore you must constantly draw and redraw a line between your medical life and the rest of your life. A medical career is a constant search for balance between these two worlds and your search for that balance will begin soon.
Be assured that if you apply the same level of diligence that brought you to this room today, you will become fine physicians. There will be many times when you will wonder if this is true but, again, be assured who you are is enough. You have what it takes or you would not be here. You are so talented that if they expelled all of you and brought in 100 people from the waiting list, they would become fine physicians too.
This medical school agrees with Francis Peabody who wrote, in 1926, that the secret of caring for patients is to care for the patient. We believe that the best way to produce physicians who care for the patient is to show you in thought, word and deed that we care for you not only as students, but as multi-faceted human beings struggling to master a difficult art. Here are some of the ways we believe will help you feel cared for: (… continued in the next post)
Tags: letter, medical education
