Congratulations to Class of 2025

Good morning distinguished guests, UNSW Medicine and Health Faculty members, staff, academics and of course, the Class of 2025.

My name is Sophie and it is my honour to address you today to celebrate the closing of what has been a long and memorable journey through medical school. And what a journey it has been! Many of us would have started together, as wide eyed medical students in 2020 sitting in Rex Vowels, but many friends have also joined us along the way from the Lateral Entry program or rejoined us after program leave.

Whether you’ve spent time at Port Macquarie, Wagga, Coffs, Albury, POW, Livo, Sutho, St George or Vinnies, something that is shared across all campuses and students, is the hard work each of us has put in to get to this point today.

And there is no doubt we are a resilient bunch. We faced two COVID lockdowns in the formative years of medical school and overcame the difficulties of social isolation with the help of regular video calls and strange online games like Among Us. We grappled the difficulties of online classes, becoming experts in complete anatomy and Microsoft Teams, even learning to sometimes turn on our cameras, when repeatedly prompted. Despite this, somehow, some of our peers never managed to fix their “broken microphones” and for our first proper online exam for BGDA, we required the pass mark to be lowered to 47%. However, we eventually got through Phase 1, completing our OSPIAs and online hospital sessions, and swapped them for a breadth of in person exposure of Phase 2. Since then the years have flown by with research, electives and clinical placements with real patients and we have developed academically and clinically far from where we started.

I also think that we can be proud of ourselves for being a cohort who have definitely maintained their lives outside of medicine, from social sport teams, to pub trivia meet ups and the occasional pubcrawl. All the while many of us have worked to support ourselves, cared for loved ones and even cared for ourselves in times of physical and mental difficulty. Special thanks to each of you who contribute to student life every day, from those who have participated in societies over the years to those who contribute in tutorials or bring life and laughter to each of our clinical schools.

And where would we be without the teachers and mentors who have guided us to where we are today. From academic staff who have followed us throughout the whole degree like Martin Weber, Gary Velan and Sue Britton, Greg in 4th year and academic staff who have taught us more recently and shaped our thinking as Phase 3s like Joyce El Haddad and Megan Kalucy. Not to mention the iconic clinical teachers at our home hospitals, such as Dr Michael Su from Coffs, Dr Gold at Vinnies and Dr Moyle at Albury,

just to name a few. Countless thank yous also to all the people who do work behind the scenes for us, from Faculty like Sean Kennedy, Dani and Sandra, to Petrina, Kerrie and the admin staff at our home hospitals - individuals such as Sophia at POW, Kirsty at Wagga, Bron at Port Mac or Shalini and Tracey at Livo, who make the world go round for medical students every day. Each of us also have our own people to thank who have been supporting us every step of the way, for me, my family, dogs, partner and friends.

There are endless people I could thank and I hope we each take the opportunity to thank those individuals who have made studying medicine possible for us across the last 6 years.

Graduation is also a bittersweet time, as it is a time for goodbyes. I wish the best of luck to anyone moving overseas or interstate…or to Nepean. We will miss all our wonderful international and interstate students who are leaving us, but we are also happy that you can return to your homes and loved ones who are undoubtedly so proud of you. To those who will stick around with NSW Health for a little longer, we are in for another incredible journey as interns together, spread across almost every hospital network in the state.

I am proud to graduate with such a hard-working, engaged and empathetic cohort of doctors and I hope you are too. In a busy and complicated healthcare system, I hope that each of you retains the hope and optimism of a medical student and remember what it was like to be day 1 on the wards knowing close to nothing.

I am keen to see where we all go in the future and hope we shall always share the camaraderie of being the class of 2025 for UNSW Medicine. I have prepared a video, which will be shown soon, hopefully to remind you all of where we started and where we are now. Apologies if there are any embarrassing photos, I had to dig deep into the MedSoc Facebook and stalk your instagrams to find photos.

Genuinely, thank you for the past 6 years together and best of luck for what’s ahead, I have every trust that the next chapter is bright for each and every one of you.