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To the medical school graduating class of 2021:
As I write this, I imagine a younger version of myself sitting next to you, not knowing, like you, what will come next.
I worried, during that anxious period between graduation and the start of residency, whether I was up to the physical and mental tasks of being a physician: the long hours and the intellectual requirements of practicing medicine. What I learned was that the most important challenges would be emotional, ethical, and philosophical, tests of the spirit and soul rather than of the body and mind.