It is with great honor that I now
introduce the first of the Harvard Medical School
class of 2023 student speakers, Hai Lin Cho.
[APPLAUSE]
Hai Lin was born in Seoul, South Korea
and moved to the United States in 2001,
where she grew up in Palo Alto, California.
Woo!
She then became an East Coast convert
to attend Dartmouth College, where she graduated summa cum
laude with a degree in biology.
After graduation, Helen completed
a bioethics fellowship at the NIH,
before matriculating here at Harvard Medical School.
Here, she has been engaged in medical education and oncology
research, from conducting phase I
clinical trials in triple negative breast cancer,
to analyzing ethical issues in access
to emerging cancer diagnostics.
However, she considers her true legacy at Harvard
to be the drawings and photographs
she's taken of her friends and the homemade baked goods she
feeds them.
Helen will soon be starting internal medicine residency
less than 100 feet from this podium,
at Brigham and Women's Hospital, after which she hopes
to pursue a career in oncology.
She's joined here today by her parents, to whom she dedicates
all of her success, and who she did not warn
about this upcoming speech.
[LAUGHTER]
Her remarks are titled, The Power of Story.
Please join me in welcoming Hai Lin Cho.
[CHEERING]
Thank you, Ahmed, and thank you everyone for being here today.
Seven years ago, my doctors told me
that they weren't sure I would make it to the end of the year,
let alone to medical school, if I didn't
start prioritizing my health.
Today, I am graduating from Harvard Medical School,
with a group of intelligent, passionate, and diverse peers.
We made it, guys!
All of us here today have been through
thick and thin in our journeys to this moment.
And what a journey.
It's been, from road tripping to Vermont
with pizza boxes hanging out of our trucks,
to waking up at 5:00 AM to wake up our patients at 6:00 AM,
to ask them whether they farted overnight--
journeys composed of multitudes of stories.
I stand here today because several months ago,
thinks that a guilt tripping-- oh, I mean encouragement--
of a close friend and classmate, I found myself on a plane
to Anchorage, Alaska to take part in Harvard's Community
Engagement in Health Care clerkship.
Beyond the frozen Arctic tundra that
left knee with three black toes and multiple encounters
with moose, what I really left Anchorage with
was a collection of stories and an appreciation
for what those stories mean for medicine.
And those lessons are what I hope
to share with you all today.
One, as physicians, we should strive
to understand not just the stories
of our individual patients, but of our larger communities.
In Anchorage, I observed at South Central foundation,
a health care organization owned by and serving
Alaska native communities.
Their success, I learned, came from embodying their community,
training, employing, and partnering
with their community.
On the first full day of the rotation,
we participated in a workshop on historical and generational
trauma, learning about the complicated and often
exploratory relationship between the government,
the medical system, and Alaska native communities,
the stripping of tradition and family
that results in cultures of silence and fatalism.
And again and again, I saw these individual stories
fit into the larger narrative of these traumas.
And while I couldn't personally relate to the Alaska specific
facts, I could see echoes of other types
of historical and generational traumas
across the patient communities of Boston
and across the Asian and Korean-American communities
with which I identify.
In medical school, we learned to gather and appreciate
the individual patient story.
But we must also remember that patient story
is contextualized by the community they come from.
As we recently learned during Match Day, our lives,
our training will take us to places we never anticipated.
And wherever we go, we should strive
to build rapport with their communities
in the same way we approach relationship building
and rapport with our individual patients.
That means seeing them, understanding them,
and advocating for them.
Two, the power of the story is in the interpretation.
As students, or as some of our attendings
fondly called us, future doctors,
we received many stories.
As full fledged doctors from today onwards,
we are poised to receive hundreds more.
But we are also storytellers.
We tell our patients' stories to other providers.
We tell stories in our research, the ways in which we
frame our questions, our findings, our recommendations.
We even tell stories in the way we interpret and respond
to our patients in the moment.
On my last day in Anchorage, the vise president
of medical services at South Central foundation
told us, the best way to promote health in your patients
is to promote their self-confidence
and their autonomy.
In medicine, we often focus on problems to solve
and issues to address.
But we can also frame these efforts as trying to study
and support our patients' and communities' resilient,
to acknowledge not only what has been done to a community,
but how they have responded to it,
not just what has prevented a community from thriving,
but what has allowed them to persevere in the face of these
struggles.
And most importantly, how can we reinforce and bolster
that response by providing resources?
That is a subtle perspective, shift
but reminds us that if the power of the story
is in the interpretation, interpretation
depends on not just the storyteller,
but also the receiver.
And finally, three, there is power in owning your story.
In Alaska, we talked about sharing stories,
from surface level stories about something funny that
happened that morning, to deeper iceberg level stories
that really define who we.
We all tell stories to create connections.
Connections protect us from burnout.
Connections drive us to be in medicine,
even though, as we've learned over the last four years,
medicine is hard work.
As researcher Brene Brown once said, we are the others.
That is to say, in some ways, we are our patients.
We can understand what they feel, not
necessarily because we have lived those same experiences
but because we can associate their emotions and experiences
with our own.
We understand the pain of our patients and our loved ones,
not because we've lived it, but because we have all
experienced pain and joy.
To acknowledge that to ourselves and to others
can be a powerful experience.
Even when medicine can no longer offer cures or treatments,
we can provide value and promote healing, simply
by allowing patients to tell their stories.
And I believe that is true for us as providers.
As we promote self confidence and autonomy in our patients,
there is value to be gained from promoting
these things in ourselves.
This has at least been true for me.
I have never openly acknowledged my dual identity
as patient and provider on any platform.
In fact, I spent years feeling ashamed of
and hiding the fact of my past experiences
with an eating disorder.
But today, I feel like the gift of my time at Harvard
and of Medicine has been to show me
the importance of authenticity and of confidence in my story,
to appreciate how my experiences have helped me empathize
with my patients, and to appreciate
how my patients' strengths have allowed me to see my own.
Ultimately, we are all storytellers and receivers.
As we each go off into our various careers
as clinicians, researchers, advocates,
I encourage all of you to share your own stories
as you see fit.
Because sharing story may help you empathize,
respond, and carry other stories.
Let us each reflect about the levels at which we
tell stories, from surface stories to build rapport
with our patients, personal stories
to practice our self-empowerment, stories
to understand the communities.
We will serve, stories to explain
the data we will gather.
Let us all appreciate the power of a story.
Thank you for listening, and congratulations, class of 2023.