Sarah's Speech

Several days after the fact - just call me Fleetwood Mac, for this is my Second Hand News - here is Sarah's Graduation speech. It was, very easily, one of the best speeches I've heard. The opening "Thanks Guys..." was delivered with pitch perfect sarcasm. Without further ado:

Sarah Courchesne's Tufts Veterinary School Graduation Speech
5.20.2007
(Four days post partum)

Good afternoon and welcome to everyone. And to my classmates: under alternate circumstances I would say, “Thank you for bestowing upon me the honor of being your student speaker.”

However, considering that you are an intelligent group capable of making basic calculations such as “May 20th is 2 days before May 22nd, which is Sarah’s due date,” I suspect that my presence at this podium is based less on any fondness or admiration for me, and more on your collective, demented wish that an obstetric melodrama might unfold on this stage, thereby injecting a bit of excitement into your commencement experience. Fortunately for me, I dodged that bullet by a few days.

I pondered what it says about you that, fully aware that I would be:

a) sluggish and slow-witted in late gestation, or

b) delirious and addled by lack of sleep with a newborn in the house,

you nonetheless chose me to crystallize the experience of a veterinary medical education. Ultimately, I think either condition is a fitting allegory for the past four years, so I have tried to forgive you for installing me up here.

Mercifully, I have been instructed to limit my remarks to five minutes. I have also been instructed to keep my remarks in good taste, which is a considerably greater challenge. So, casting my mind back to graduations past, I tried to come up with traditional student-speaker themes that I could safely navigate within the bounds of good taste.

There is, of course, the familiar “graduation by the numbers,” where the student recites a litany of numeric figures meant to signify the previous four years. Something along the lines of “we have spent forty five hundred thousand hours in lecture, taken six thousand seventy three exams” and so on. But when I attempted to make a similar list based on my experience at Tufts, it was considerably less impressive. I have accumulated: one profoundly neurotic and maladjusted teaching beagle, eight thousand two hundred three emails from Barbara Berman, two needlepoint Christmas stockings and three embroidered throw pillows I constructed during the endless lectures of third year, and one deep-seated, visceral, norepinephrine-mediated reaction to the sound of a pager’s beeping. So, I determined that I should not pursue “graduation by the numbers,” and continued my search for a theme to these remarks.

I considered the time-honored “graduation by the book” tradition, where the student chooses a few lofty abstractions that encapsulate the four years and reads their definitions. For instance, “Perseverance: Webster’s dictionary defines perseverance as…” and so on. But when I attempted to choose a few words that might evoke for you the whole of our four years here, I kept coming back to terms like “obtunded,” “mucopurulent,” and, to reminisce back to first year, “tamponade” which, to our universally adolescent glee, Saunder’s Comprehensive Veterinary Dictionary defines as “the surgical use of a tampon.” So, clearly, I elected not to pursue the “graduation by the book” theme.

I also looked into the wealth of pre-packaged graduation speeches available on-line. One site looked promising; a set of three speeches appropriate for a medical school commencement, recently marked down to $19.97. The product description reads:

“This set of speeches express your gratitude if, as a medical graduate / student, you are speaking at your graduation ceremony. They express thanks for the help and support you have received from the college staff and from families. They mention the friendships you have made while studying. They touch on treasured memories, and they ponder on the future careers of those present and end with a good luck wish to fellow graduates. The light hearted yet sincere poems add an unusual finishing touch to the speeches.”

My hopes soared as I read this, and I was particularly eager to find out what specific treasured memories would be included with my purchase were I able to find a product tailored to our profession. But I scrolled in vain through the list of available packages; apparently, the veterinary commencement market is insufficient to support the online speech-writing industry, so once again I found myself without a theme to my remarks.

By this point I found I had nearly exhausted my allotted time and had not actually said anything of substance. Since the traditional routes for student speakers had proven ill-suited to me, I accepted that ending my remarks with trite declarations of friendship and community would be similarly out of character. I also refuse to enlist any tragically well-worn and much abused quotations by either Frost or Shakespeare to define the day.

I can’t conclude with soaring praise and the conviction that we will all go forth and accomplish great things as veterinarians because I stand before you as proof that this is not so (not for the time being anyway). I have neither sought nor secured employment in our new profession and so am unlikely to achieve anything veterinary related in the foreseeable future. And while many of you may describe your new jobs and internships this way, I am literally working for someone who screams incoherently whenever he wants something, expects me to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no financial compensation and who doesn’t even know my name.

So, I am clearly not qualified to offer advice on your new careers, and I don’t presume to know what the past four years have meant to each of you, or where on the spectrum from abject misery to exultant bliss your veterinary education has fallen. But there is one thing I suspect may be true of all of us today: the word “doctor” rattling self-consciously around in our heads. After a while, it’s expected that we will all grow accustomed to this new prefix and come to take it for granted. Since I will be at home experiencing the practice of veterinary medicine only vicariously, I urge you not to become complacent, but to work hard not only to make me look good by association, but to prove yourselves deserving of this new title and this remarkable new profession. I have a feeling you will.

Good luck to you all and congratulations.