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President’s Message
I am honored and humbled to be your Medical School Alumni Association President. Thank you for this opportunity to serve you and help continue to support our alma mater. Founded in 1867, the alumni association’s goals are “to keep alive and perpetuate that kindly and cordial feeling which binds us together by reason of our common alma mater; to encourage the interchange of professional experience and keep alive that ardor … to elevate the standard of medical education; and likewise to secure to the institution a record of the professional history of its alumni.”
There is a poem by Will Allen Dromgoole which encapsulates how we should view our role as medical school alumni, considering we are “old men and women” who have crossed the medical school chasm.
The Bridge Builder
An old man, going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, deep, and wide,
With water rolling, cold and deep.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here,
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way,
You’ve crossed the chasm deep and wide,
Why build you this bridge at eventide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head,
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today,
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
The chasm that was as naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be,
He, too, must cross in twilight dim,
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him.”
We all should be working together to build the bridge for future Northwestern University medical students. If you have ideas to make this bridge stronger, contact me at j-hill2@northwestern.edu or Ginny Darakjian at v-darakjian@northwestern.edu.
Carpe diem,
Jimmy Hill, MD ’74, GME ‘79
President, Alumni Association
