Reunion Reflections

In June, I’ll attend my 20th Harvard Medical School reunion. That milestone has made me reflect on something I’ve come to believe deeply: what you remember about an experience is idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and often wildly different from what you expect to carry with you.

Looking back, the things that linger from my HMS years aren’t the meticulously prepared lectures on anatomy or the hundreds of PowerPoint slides on pathophysiology, though I’m sure those shaped me in ways I no longer fully appreciate. What I remember, vividly and emotionally, is the institution’s value system: the implicit values absorbed through culture, and the explicit ones modeled and taught by extraordinary educators who saw their work as more than instruction. They were forming doctors. They were forming us.

What follows are the memories — impressionistic but enduring — that rise to the surface as I approach this reunion.

Learning How to Learn

Humility was taught to us not as an abstract virtue but as a pragmatic necessity. I still hear Dan Lowenstein, MD ’83, then vice dean for education at HMS, offer the now-famous reminder: “Fifty percent of what we teach you will be wrong. The only question is which 50 percent.”

It was a radical invitation to adopt a learner’s posture for life. The New Pathway wasn’t simply a curriculum, it was an epistemology. It asked us to be perpetually curious, to interrogate our assumptions, and to metabolize new information in ways that made us better for our patients.

If I had to choose one intellectual inheritance from medical school that shaped my professional life — inside and outside the clinic — it would be that: a relentless commitment to learning, and a quiet awareness that certainty is often the enemy of progress.

Recognizing Unintended Consequences

My Patient-Doctor II preceptor at Cambridge Health Alliance was David Hirsh, who would later become a leading national voice in longitudinal integrated clerkships. Week after week, he returned to a deceptively simple principle: before diving into exotic diagnoses, ask whether the patient’s symptoms might be the side effect of something we introduced. It was Occam’s razor filtered through deep respect for the patient’s lived reality.

Two decades later, I find myself invoking that lesson constantly — not just with medicines, but with systems, policies, and organizational decisions. Every intervention has consequences. Many are unintended. David taught us to look for them first.

Connecting Community, Health, and Social Justice

One of the first people my classmates and I met at HMS was Nancy Oriol, MD ’79, then dean for medical education. She told us the origin story of the Family Van, her mobile health innovation cofounded with Cheryl Dorsey, MD ’93. The idea was disarmingly simple and profoundly subversive: If patients don’t or can’t come to us, we go to them.

It was my earliest education in what we now call social determinants of health — long before the term became ubiquitous. Nancy was teaching us, quietly and intentionally, that health care is delivered within a social context that shapes access, trust, and outcomes.

Around the same time, Joseph Betancourt, then an early-career faculty member and now a national authority on health equity, gave a lecture on disparities that left me with a sense of moral unease I still feel. It was a recognition that injustice lives in quiet, structural places, and we, as physicians, are either complicit in it or working against it. There is no neutral position.

Taking the Endeavor Seriously

Every medical student encounters rough patches; I had my share. During one particularly difficult period, Richard Schwartzstein, MD ’79, then director of medical education at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a central figure in HMS pedagogy, met with me. He spoke plainly: what we were pursuing was grave, vital, and meaningful. It was not to be undertaken lightly.

His steady seriousness — and similar counsel from educators like Estee Sharon, who brought a blend of rigor and humanity to her teaching — helped anchor me. They reminded me that medicine is a calling that demands our full selves, including the parts that struggle.

Practicing Medical Ethics as a Living Discipline

One of the most quietly influential experiences of my training was an ethics elective taught by Walter Robinson, a pulmonologist known for his thoughtful engagement with the ethical dimensions of care. I can’t quote a single lecture verbatim, but the course left a permanent imprint: Medicine takes place within a matrix of professional norms, societal values, and competing duties.

Walter taught us that physicians must examine and question the moral frameworks around them — not once, but continually. Ethics was not something you finish learning. It was something you practice.

Finding Joy in Doctoring

My internal medicine rotation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital remains one of the purest expressions of why people choose to become doctors. My attending was Niteesh Choudhry, and our resident, Seth Goldbarg, together with intern Anthony Gutierrez, MD ’04, modeled a kind of medicine that was rigorous but joyful.

They connected deeply with patients. They found meaning in the details of people’s lives. And, equally memorable, they made the work fun. That rotation taught me that medicine isn’t just serious, it can also be profoundly uplifting.

And then there are the smaller memories that stay with you: during my obstetrics rotation at Beth Israel Deaconess, a patient I cared for named her newborn son after me. I have carried that story with me for 20 years. It is a reminder that our presence in people’s lives matters far beyond the discrete interventions we perform.

A Career Rooted in Values

Different memories of HMS come alive depending on what’s happening in my life at any given moment. With my father’s recent passing, for example, I remember his pride at dropping me off at my first year, as well as at our graduation. But what shaped me more than any specific incidents or encounters were the values — humility, curiosity, seriousness, justice, and joy.

I have always felt grateful that my career as a doctor began in a place so deeply grounded in the complexities of the human endeavor. Two decades later, as I plan for my 20th reunion, it is clear that HMS didn’t just train me to be a physician. It trained me to engage with the world — with all its uncertainty, inequity, and potential — with a sense of purpose.

And for that, I will always feel profoundly fortunate.

Sachin H. Jain, MD ’06, is president and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, an adjunct professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a contributor to Forbes.