Ruisi Chen’s convocation speech argues that medical training should be grounded in humanity, not just expertise: “be a person before a scholar.” She links Harvard’s scientific capabilities to the persistent gap in access and suffering, and uses personal stories, especially asthma inequity in Boston, to call graduates to use their skills for people who are still being left behind.
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This is a short commencement address from Ruisi Chen, the 2026 student speaker for Harvard Medical School’s Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health. The speech’s central thesis is simple and explicit: graduates should lead as people first and scholars second. Chen opens with a childhood memory from Shenzhen, where her mother told her in Chinese to “Be a person before a scholar,” and says that line has become the organizing principle of her Harvard experience. She frames the class’s education as broad and interdisciplinary: some classmates studied molecules, some data, some ethics, media, education, policy, and safety. Yet despite the extraordinary technical capability of modern medicine—genome sequencing in hours, real-time brain imaging, engineered cells, disease models—she says suffering remains widespread. …
No market setup is present; tactically, this is a values speech, not a tradable thesis. The only immediate actionable idea is the call to keep patient need and equity in front of technical ambition.
Over the coming months, the speech implies that meaningful work should be measured by whether graduates move into patient-centered, disparity-aware roles and institutions. The view would be validated by concrete service to underserved communities and invalidated by purely prestige-driven paths.
The structural message is that healthcare’s lasting challenge is not invention but distribution: advanced medicine can coexist with unresolved suffering. The long-run implication is that ethical practice and equitable access remain the core test of institutional legitimacy.
Medical training should be guided by being a person first and a scholar second.
Direct thesis of the speech, introduced via the speaker’s mother’s advice and repeated throughout.
Medicine has unprecedented technical capability, but suffering still remains widespread.
The speaker contrasts scientific advancement with persistent unmet need.
There is a gap between what medicine can do and who it reaches.
The speech explicitly identifies access as the core problem.
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