What? Part II

My parents and I arrived at Davies Symphony Hall early morning. My classmates and their families milled about. After becoming accustomed to seeing my friends in scrubs, it was wonderfully surprising to see them dressed up. The venue was fabulous, the perfect amount of space while remaining cozy. It filled up, even to the upper balcony. The hall featured a "cloud" of convex acrylic reflecting panels as a ceiling and an organ built-in to the rear wall. We took lots of pictures and lined up in the depths of the building. Then, a brass quintet playing pomp and circumstance heralded the procession as we emerged to the applause and cheers of a packed house.

Dr. Hawgood, Dean of Medicine, gave a warm and thoughtful welcome with his distinguished accent. The speaker was Ezekiel Emanuel, Special Advisor for Health Policy and Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. I was impressed; he has a degree from Oxford and a PhD in political philosophy. His talk was amusing and inspiring, as commencement speeches are. The senior address was given by my classmate Jed and he did an outstanding delivery. He's one of the best public speakers I know. This was followed by the presentation of the Gold Headed Cane award; I'll reserve the history of this for another blog (since I like history of medicine).

Finally, Chancellor Desmond-Hellmann conferred us the degree of Doctor of Medicine. We came onto stage with our parents (or other loved ones) for the hooding ceremony. The first time I heard "Dr. Craig Chen" felt surreal. Was that really me? I walked onto stage and shook hands with Dr. Irby, Vice Dean of Education. Then in a UCSF tradition, my parents hooded me. I really liked this; it was a lot more personal and meaningful than having one of the associate deans hood me. We all took a picture before leaving the stage.

After all my classmates were hooded, we took the Oath of Louis Lasagna that we had recited at the white coat ceremony. The most special aspect of this was the languages. Students whose first language was not English went on stage to recite the first line of the oath in their native language. We had 17 languages represented, including Arabic, Yoruba, Cantonese, Farsi, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

It was such a wonderful ceremony followed by a lovely reception. It really spoke to me and played the role of that rite of passage I desperately needed. I hope that I uphold those virtues of the oath I took and those wonders of the title I received.