My Graduation Speech

Here is the text of the graduation speech. A few of you asked me to post it, so here are my notes... I may have improvised some from this original, but hope you enjoy it!

Graduation Speech

First of all, on behalf of my fellow graduates, I want to thank our friends and our family for all of their support and encouragement for the last 2 and ½ years. Our friends, our parents, our husbands, our wives, and, for a few of us, our children have all sacrificed a lot of time and money for us and invested a lot in us while we pursued our goal of becoming Physician Assistants, and we are very grateful for all of you. The least we can do tonight is to give you a round of applause for all you’ve done for us (start clapping).
Now, if you can continue that support for another month or so while we study for and take the national certification exam, we will be eternally grateful!

I also want to thank all of our professors, our preceptors, and the staff of the Surgical Physician Assistant Program for all of your instruction, your advice, your guidance, your hard work in our classes, in our clinical rotations, and behind the scenes for us over the last 27 months. If I could have all of the faculty, the preceptors that are here tonight, and the support staff please stand…
We know you do what you do because you love to do it and we are grateful for everything you’ve done for us!

No more pencils, no more books, no more Mr. Harrelson’s dirty looks… about getting our paperwork turned in and our Typhon entries done…
Speaking of Typhon, no more entire weekends spent logging what I like to call “composite” patient encounters into Typhon…
No more pencils, no more books, no more Dr. Huechtker’s “interesting”(?) jokes… The kind where you think, “Should I laugh… or be embarrassed?”
No more pencils, no more books, no more Mr. Drace’s 500 slide power point presentations with 1000 animated emoticons, and, sadly, no more Drace-isms, of which my personal favorite was, “I gave Toradol out like it was candy, y’all!”
No more pencils, no more books, no more of everyone’s favorite assignment: Professor Swatzell’s “pretend you have a disease for a day and write about it your experience in a journal…”
No more pencils, no more books, no more Professor Ridings wonderful demonstrations and his grim prognostications… “Yeah, there’s really nothing we can do for these people… They die.”
No more pencils, no more books, no more Dr. Jennings raving about Duke… No more Jennings in your face, on your case, calling you out in class, rolling on the floor like a baby (literally), and taking every single opportunity to push you further than you ever wanted to go - usually over the edge of sanity…
And finally, no more pencils, no more books, no more Dr. Rapp’s… well, no more Dr. Rapp. Actually, Dr. Rapp was planning to join us tonight via teleconference but we had “technical difficulties.” I heard that someone from UAB is at Dr. Rapp’s house right now, in the closet, working on the problem...


We have had a lot of fun together over the last 27 months. And we made it to the finish line, although after Dr. Rapp’s final exam with 180 questions in two hours and after our Gross Anatomy exams, I know some of us doubted we would. But we did, and we learned a lot along the way.
We learned a lot, of course, about surgery, anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, pathology, and all the other –ologies so necessary to becoming a Physician Assistant, but we learned a lot outside the classroom, too.
I remember before I started PA school, I expected UAB to be a tightly integrated system of education where all the professors were alike and taught the same, tested the same, all following some brilliant master plan that worked like clockwork to spit out fully-formed PAs. Then we started classes and I realized, there is no clockwork… These professors are absolutely nothing alike! Each professor taught differently, tested differently (some from test to test), they acted differently, gave different answers to the same questions… I mean, we have a very diverse faculty from a wide range of backgrounds.
Then, as we got to know one another as students, I realized how different all of us were, too…
People from small towns in Mississippi and Alabama (not too many people have ever heard of Madrid or Centre), people from cites like Baltimore, Boston, St. Louis, Indianapolis, people from Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and even South Dakota. People in their very early twenties to people in the thirties (and beyond)…
All of us brought our different values, experiences, beliefs and perspectives together and we were forced to literally share our lives together for 2 and ½ years. We were together for hours a day every day going through this intense, difficult process together, and I think we learned, over time, to appreciate or at least respect the different perspectives each of us brought to the table.
Of course, all of us are pretty headstrong, and we had our share of conflict, our share of differences, especially when the stress was at all-time highs (Who’s bucking this bronco, right Allison?), but we learned over time to work together and learned to listen to one another, even if, at times, we didn’t like one another very much!
Looking back on it now, I think learning from dramatically different professors, doing clinical rotations with a wide range of preceptors, and learning alongside people with radically different perspectives taught us all something, something we may not even realize we have learned.
Recently, I was reading a speech given by Dr. Eugene Stead, the “father” of the PA profession, who started the first PA program at, yes, Dr. Jennings, at Duke in 1965. In that speech, Dr. Stead said that in that first class, what they were looking for in a student was someone who could listen to what others were saying, who could take criticism and still “stand their ground” about things that were important.
I think he said this because he realized that the role of a PA is to connect and interact with patients, and nurses and physicians. The PA has to be able to listen to and respect different perspectives from every angle and still “stand their ground” and do what’s best for the patient, regardless of what pressures may exist from the other perspectives in the interaction.
And I think what we learned, whether we realize it or not, in the 2 and ½ years we spent together, was to do exactly what Dr. Stead said he wanted in those first PAs, listen to and respect the different perspectives, make a decision about what’s best, and then stand our ground to see it through.
I hope that as we graduate and go on to practice medicine, we will remember the time we had together and what we learned from one another and make a real difference in the lives of the people we care for.
Thank you for the opportunity to share what I learned from all of you in the time we had together in PA school.