‘Blessed and Excited’

For Eubee Koo, one of nearly 200 Harvard medical and dental school graduates who received degrees under sweltering skies on Thursday, this year’s commencement capped a five-year wait for one very important day.

“I am very thrilled today,” said Koo. “It’s been amazing. I’ve had the time of my life.”

Originally a member of the HMS Class of 2014, Koo took a year off to conduct research in dermatology, later switching gears to pursue a career in ophthalmology.

“Would I do it again? Probably not,” Koo said, then laughed. “The rotations are tough, but getting accustomed to practicing and working with the hospital teams is good. It was a really rewarding experience.”

Koo, whose residency will be in Florida, near her home of Orlando, joined her classmates early in the morning in Cambridge for the Harvard University commencement ceremony, lining up on Quincy Street just outside Sever Hall before proceeding toward Tercentenary Theater in Harvard Yard, where university dignitaries and proud families awaited the graduates.

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After Drew Faust, president of Harvard University, conferred their degrees, the newly minted medical graduates proudly displayed new red stethoscopes and brand-new dental graduates waved toothbrushes in the air. Both groups then returned to the HMS quadrangle to hear from the leaders of their respective schools and receive diplomas.

“It’s really awesome to have worked for so many years here and share this with my classmates on the Quad,” said Jeffrey Cohen, whose next step is a residency in dermatology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

“Cambridge is great, but we walked on this Quad so many times and we spent so much time in the hospitals, it means so much to be here. It’s a great, great day,” Cohen said.

A Long Journey

Beneath a huge white tent that spanned the Quad, friends and relatives waited with bouquets and cameras, ready to congratulate their loved ones. Guests watched a slideshow with incongruous snowy scenes as the temperatures across the Longwood Medical Area climbed into the 80s.

Dental school graduate Demyana Ramez Azer thanked her young cousin, Peter, for dressing so nicely for the occasion, in a navy blue blazer and peach tie. Her family had just taken a train up from New Jersey for the day to mark a milestone with her.

“My parents were physical therapists in Egypt, but they came here to make sure my sister and I had a better education,” Azer said. “This is a big day for us. We are very blessed—and excited.”

Graduate Grace Malvar said she had been waiting for this day for two more years than she planned.

“This was a long journey in the making, but I’m not unique in that regard,” she said as she sat with friends and family who came in from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, elsewhere in California, Seattle and Canada. “I’m excited to share the occasion with them, on their first time coming to see me in Boston.”

Malvar entered the School in 2009, but took time off because of family illness. Not the only graduate to interrupt her studies, she said she will now begin a residency in pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess.

One of her friends—a floral stylist—placed a lei around her neck. A sign on her mortarboard read “Black Lives Matter.”

“This is something we cannot ignore,” Malvar said. “It is important to acknowledge the victims of institutionalized violence. In our role in medicine as future caregivers, it is important that we don’t lose sight of the sociopolitical context in which our patients live.”

The Future of Medicine

Social concerns were raised often by the afternoon’s speakers on the Quad.

Student speakers, elected by the graduating class, focused on their responsibilities for the future of medicine.

“I’m proud to be joining this profession,” HSDM graduate Hope Lindsey Johnson said. “I respect all of those who’ve come before us, and I sincerely value the impact on day-to-day life of the service we are all now able to provide.”

Nworah Ayogu reflected on the past few years, when fellow students were weighing which branch of medicine to choose.

“Now it is time to focus on the “who” and the “how.” Who we will serve and how we will practice,” he said. “This means what patients do we treat, and thinking about who are the people who come through our door and how do we treat those patients. How do we let others speak about and refer to our patients—the parents and children, the loved ones that have been put into our care?”

Graduate and student speaker Shekinah Nefreteri Elmore, who also wore “Black Lives Matter” on her mortarboard, told her own story of having cancer as a child and as an adult, coming to HMS her first year “bald and rail thin,” two weeks after cancer surgery. She wove her experience into the larger fabric of medicine as a vocation to serve the underserved.

Her dream, she said, is to help build better health systems to address the wide range of diseases for which treatments exist but which often never reach the people who need them.

“I have been so lucky by the accident of my birth that these battles with illness have defined me in ways largely positive,” she said. “I get to practice as a physician. I can guarantee there must be another young girl somewhere who could have done the same if she’d had access to the outstanding care that I have had.

“I have been lucky, but I am not more deserving,” she said.

Class Day speaker Rajesh Panjabi also shared his own story. He is co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health, a nonprofit organization that partners with the government of Liberia to provide critical health care services in the country’s remote villages.

Panjabi spoke in awe of the selfless acts that inspired him after leaving Liberia when he was 9 years old, just as a devastating 15-year civil war began. He challenged the graduates to practice selflessness as a discipline so they can bring the promise of 21st-century medicine to everyone who needs it.

“Selfless acts give us caregivers the power to change the world,” Panjabi said. “Illness is universal, but access to care isn’t.”