Around this time of year, medical schools are engaging in a 250-year-old annual tradition: they're graduating their latest class of career-ready physicians. It's a deservedly triumphant moment -- the culmination of at least a decade's worth of determination, discipline, and grit.
Almost three decades ago, I too was a medical school graduate. I walked across the stage, was handed a rolled-up diploma, and was told I was a physician. I had chosen a new speciality -- emergency medicine -- predicated on the idea that all patients deserve high quality life-saving care, regardless of background or ability to pay. Our keynote speaker delivered a speech about medicine's illustrious history and intoxicating future, and the overall sentiment was that medicine could accomplish just about anything.
Today, I'm twice as old as I was when I graduated, with my own share of battle scars and a career path that was anything but linear. In the years since graduation, I've sometimes found myself wondering what I would tell a new physician about a career in medicine. For that matter, what did my 1998 self need to know to survive the next 30 years?
So here it is: the five things I wish someone had said at my medical school graduation.
