For the Class of 2008, celebration,
loss and an exhortation to dream

Graduates remember and honor a classmate, catch a glimpse of a former Beatle and hear from an illegal alien and migrant worker who persevered to become a neurosurgeon.

Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa
Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa inspired students with his story of coming to the United States as an illegal alien and becoming a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

For graduates in the Class of 2008, Commencement was a day of mixed emotions. As they celebrated their own passage from students to physicians, they also mourned the loss of their classmate Mila Rainof, who died April 20 after being struck by a car.

Rainof’s absence was palpable throughout the day’s events. As they marched to Old Campus, medical and public health students each left a carnation at the site of the accident at York Street and South Frontage Road. During the ceremony on Harkness Lawn, Merle Waxman, M.A., associate dean, ombudsperson and director of the Office of Women in Medicine, accepted Rainof’s medical degree posthumously. And the class gift was a donation to a scholarship fund in Rainof’s memory.

Margaret Samuels-Kalow and Ellen House took to the podium to offer their reflections on their friend. They recalled her commitment to her friends and to her patients and her seemingly boundless warmth and compassion. Samuels-Kalow urged her classmates to find other ways to remember Rainof. “We honor her memory in less tangible ways, in the ways we treat each other and our patients,” she said.

“Today is a celebration. It is not a time to focus on what was lost,” said House. “Let’s celebrate today, as Mila would have wanted us to.”

Among the treats in this year’s Commencement at Old Campus was the presence of former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, who received an honorary doctorate of music.
“Your songs awakened a generation, giving a fresh sound to rock, roll, rhythm and blues,” said President Richard C. Levin, as he awarded the diploma. “We admire your musical genius and your generous support of worthy causes.”

At the medical school’s ceremony, Commencement speaker Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, M.D., peppered his speech with quotations from Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., and his own father. But Quiñones-Hinojosa’s own narrative was equally inspiring. He recounted how 20 years ago he packed his few possessions into a bag and, with $65 to his name, crossed the border illegally from Mexico to California. The same hands that now probe “the most beautiful organ in the human body—the brain” were once bloody and raw from pulling weeds in the farms of the San Joaquin Valley. After an industrial accident almost killed him, Quiñones-Hinojosa recalled what his father told him. “You have been given a gift,” his father said. “Life is short.”

Quiñones-Hinojosa went on to community college and Harvard Medical School and is now a neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Click here for a full transcript of this year’s commencement speech.

Commencement awards

This year’s Bohmfalk Prizes for excellence in teaching went to Leigh V. Evans, M.D., assistant professor of surgery (emergency medicine), for clinical sciences, and to Aldo J. Peixoto, M.D., associate professor of medicine (nephrology), for basic science.

Thomas P. Duffy, M.D., professor of medicine (hematology), received the Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award. The Leah M. Lowenstein Award went to Nina Horowitz, M.D., assistant clinical professor of surgery, and Andres S. Martin, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor in the Child Study Center and of psychiatry.

Eve R. Colson, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics, received the Alvan R. Feinstein Award. Lynn D. Wilson, M.D., professor of therapeutic radiology and of dermatology, received the Francis Gilman Blake Award. And the Betsy Winters House Staff Award went to Vikram Reddy, M.D., a resident in surgery.

—John Curtis