KAROL MARCINKOWSKI UNIVERSITY OF MEDICAL SCIENCES

CLASS OF 2000 GRADUATION CEREMONY

GRADUATION SPEECH DELIVERED BY ILONA E. SAWICKI

June 2, 2000

Distinguished members of the faculty; Honored guests, family, friends; Dear classmates:

Thank you for this opportunity to share with you some of my cherished memories of the past four years. We might not have a yearbook, but the pictures we took over the years have remained vivid in our memories

When I received the letter of acceptance into a medical programme at this university, I was ecstatic.  I have always wanted to become a physician and the chance now presented itself to me.  The joy was soon shadowed by clouds of doubt and uncertainty. 

I was faced with a difficult decision of whether or not to spend my next four years in Poland, leave behind everyone I loved and everything I cared about.  I was hesitating. The question I ultimately asked myself was: Where do I see myself five or ten years from today?  Holding an MD Diploma in hand or ... still being a lab tech?  If it was a multiple choice exam, I would have answered a).  I asked myself: Will I fit in?  Who will my classmates be? Will I be able to cope with the amount of material that an average student of medicine is required to handle?  Knowing the language eased the assimilation process, but I still felt so lost and overwhelmed in the country I had left exactly half of my lifetime ago. Who would have thought that those four years would go by so fast and that it will be so difficult to part.

I landed in Warsaw with a heavy heart and even heavier suitcases.  A few more boxes of indispensable belongings were to be shipped by my parents.  I felt an enormous relief that I didn’t purchase every single item on the list provided to freshmen. 

We moved into Eskulap.  At first sight, our dorm looked like a grey quadrilateral block of cement.  It was about to become my home for the next four years.

My future classmates arrived shortly after.  Fatigue and the jet lag masked confusion and fear that we all experienced.  No one liked to admit it.  That same night we hanged out at the Dubliner, an Irish pub, where we bonded with each other and our upper classmen.  Some were enthusiastic about their studying in Poland, others appeared dicouraged by life’s little hurdles; most agreed that medicine accepts nothing less than absolute devotion.  We walked around the city in big groups, as only half of us spoke Polish, you could spot us from afar - freshmen...  We soon discovered that the majority of young people in Poland speaks English.  And more were willing to learn.  At the ceremony of  Inauguration, we have officialy been accepted as members of the university.  The first official class picture was taken on this very same stage, from which we are about to step down our MD Diplomas in hand.  Today’s picture will not be an exact replica of the one taken four eyars ago.  Some of us decided to pursue other paths, returned to the States.  We made it and we are here today to celebrate our courage and to collect our prize: that significant document that will one day hang framed in our offices. 

In September 1996, we attended our first Histology class: all of us punctual.   Excluding a couple of finals, this situation rarely happened again.  During breaks, somewhere between three cups of coffee, we get to know each other, and those standing in line with us.  Lost in translation, we struggle with basic Polish expressions:  How are you?  What are you studying?  What's your phone number? By pure respect for an older colleague, we strictly adhere to the advice that he conveyed to us:  find yourself somebody to love and you will no longer miss the States.  You have to believe me when I say that some of my classmates’ language skills have since become much more sophisticated...  We still missed our American land.  To recandle the spirit of sharing, we celebrated yearly Thanksgiving dinners.  We served on our tables turkey and corn, cranberries and mashed potatoes.  We went to concerts and to the movies, we phoned a lot, and we all accumulated frequent flyer miles. 

During the second year, the pictures all of a sudden become blurry.  Sleepless nights, sleepless days, we dragged our aching bodies and souls to lectures, mechanically we scrambled down uncomprehensible sounds, hoping it becomes more understandable later; I am pretty sure that I could have had a wealthier lifestyle had I only thought of patenting my Pathophysiology notes.  

There are days when we stared at blank pages on our desks and fell asleep, confused as to the time of day or night it was, too drained to look at the clock, and despite the overwhelming evidence that there is still so much to learn.

The Summer after our second year was the time for an early vacation for some of us, of paramount effort and hardship of studying for Step 1 for others.  Few of us were brave enough to accept the challenge and take the exam after the second year.  As a class, we performed well, and it was a personal achievement for several students. 

Third year: We wore white coats and delivered our first babies - halfway of becoming full fledged physicians.  So what if the patients called me "nurse" (that still makes me rage), we felt like doctors already.  We cried at night after consulting children dying of neoplasms.  We realized that medicine is so frequently hopeless in face of disease, that our treatment cures some, harms others, that ther is always a price to pay.  We came to the realization that our job is to relieve pain, shorten suffering, help families and relatives grieve, cope, accept. 

For a lot of our families who haven't returned to Poland for a while, it's almost unthinkable how this country has changed, and so have we, in so many ways.  We still like to hang out at the Old Square at night, we still spend sleepless nights talking about medical and philosophical matters, analyzing everyone's character, decisions, reactions.  Some of us still ask their parents to ship them munchies from the States - and you know who you are.  But today we pick a Lech or Tyskie over a Budweiser, and we are not afraid to consume large quantities of pierogi and bigos.  Poznan has provided us with a wonderful melange of international accents and local customs, concerts, movies, friends, maybe future partners for life. And of course a valuable education. 

We've expanded our horizons - for sure; we've learnt to be more tolerant towards people of foreign nations, language and culture - certainly; we've matured and become overall more responsible - yes.  

We may not have a yearbook, but we have so much more: we have each other and we have memories that will stay with us when we finally leave Poznan.  Let’s return to those memories often, let’s not allow them to faint, let’s make more at an Alumni reunion in five years!