Medical students across the country are graduating during a unique moment in history and many will quickly find themselves standing on the front lines of the novel coronavirus pandemic. On Saturday, more than 150 graduates of the 2020 class at Morehouse School of Medicine took those first steps.
The virtual commencement ceremony featured an appearance by award-winning musician John Legend and keynote speaker Gary Gibbons, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
During the two-hour ceremony, streamed in partnership with Shared Studios, Morehouse School of Medicine President Valerie Montgomery Rice also announced a gift of approximately $600,000 to the class of 2020 to help lower the amount of student debt. Eligible graduating seniors who were not awarded full scholarships or grants will receive no less than $2,000 to reduce their medical school debt, she said.
“Because our mission is focused on producing general practitioners and family physicians, we want them to go out and be able to practice in the underserved communities that we focus on without having to worry about paying off such large student debt,” said spokesman Bill Doughty.
The goal is to provide 100 percent of graduating students with some level of scholarship support, Doughty said.
On Saturday morning, almost 4,000 viewers tuned in as Legend sang an a cappella version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” by James Weldon Johnson.
Gibbons, Montgomery Rice and former Atlanta mayor and ambassador Andrew Young acknowledged the challenges and opportunities the graduates would face as new doctors and researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Their skills will be particularly important to help combat a virus that has devastated and disproportionately burdened certain minority communities, Gibbons said.
“(The pandemic) has revealed the social determinants of health and it is indeed a call and a challenge to who the Morehouse School of Medicine is, its very being and why it exists,” Gibbons said. “The class of 2020 is being called to rise to that challenge created by this particular moment in history. If the community ever needed the Morehouse School of Medicine, it needs you now.”
Young compared the 2020 graduates to the Lone Ranger, referring to both as mask-wearing conquerors of evil. “You have power at your disposal that you cannot now imagine,” he said. “Unfortunately, we are sending you out at one of the most difficult times faced by this nation but we are not sending you out alone.”
Montgomery Rice encouraged students to hold on to their passions, believe in limitless possibilities and remember while they care for others to also take care of themselves.
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