Honors Convocation 2000

"Countless opportunities for achievement will present themselves to you…" -Dean Allen S. Lichter

Telling the assembled students that they would "carry on a tradition that will make us proud in years to come," and that many further opportunities for distinction await them, Dean Allen Lichter, M.D., convened the annual honors convocation held in Rackham Auditorium the evening before graduation. Thirty-six awards were presented to students and six to members of the faculty. Named in honor of esteemed members of the faculty over the history of the School and sometimes in honor of those who established the prizes, the awards highlight outstanding performance in medical studies, in research, in clinical care and in teaching.

The evening's address was given by James O. Woolliscroft, M.D., executive associate dean, professor of internal medicine and the Josiah Macy Jr. Professor of Medical Education, who noted that it was either "the first or the last honors convocation of the millennium," depending on your view, and that either way, it was an historic event, made even more historic by the fact that the students are members of the School's 150th class.

He reminded the students of history's fast-changing pace, and the reality that much of what they have been taught may eventually become irrelevant or be proven wrong. It wouldn't be the "myriad of facts" they had learned that would determine their success, he suggested, but rather how well they had learned to think, to frame and ask questions, to use resources, especially the people around them, wisely, to ask fundamental questions, to interact well with others and to continue learning.

They would, he said, have to remember to see each patient as distinct from every other patient, to sift out the important from the not important in framing clinical questions, a skill he predicted they would "hone to a fine level" over the next three to eight years of their residencies.

He told them they would face many fundamental issues, from conflicts of interest to unionization to the ethical choices that would be forced upon them by advances in technology, including new understandings of the human genome. He suggested that they not back away from the difficult dilemmas they would have to address, such as the conflicts inherent in maintaining loyalty to individual patients while managing resources for the collective good.

Woolliscroft said he didn't know what changes would challenge them to learn new things; only that, based on his own experience, "medicine will be fundamentally different" in the years ahead. Their patients, he predicted, would be among their best teachers and would help them define their future curriculum in medicine. He cautioned them to not get so caught up in demands for efficiency that they forget the value of contemplation, curiosity, observation and reflection.

Especially, he said, they must take the time to listen and learn from their patients. He related an anecdote from early in his own medical career when a highly educated patient, having been given a lengthy and accurate review of the odds of recovery for his condition, stopped the young physician in mid-conversation. "He stopped me short and he told me that my ratios and percentages were meaningless to him, that they didn't help him a bit," Woolliscroft related. "He said that for him, the numbers were zero and one. Either he would make it or he wouldn't, and nothing else mattered." That patient, Woolliscroft said, like many others over the years, helped him learn that in his role as a healer, "knowing the literature" wasn't his only task.

"Medicine is a lifelong passion, a calling," he said. "I hope you'll come back in 25 years and tell us that the education you received here at Michigan gave you a foundation you could build on, that what you learned here gave you the confidence and the skills you needed to keep on learning, to engage in a lifetime of discoveries about yourself and your life in medicine."