‘Tis the season for graduation speeches. This video above is a re-imagination of an incredible one given by David Foster Wallace a short while before his untimely suicide. It excerpts a portion of the speech that DFW used to illustrate what he believed was the true value of a liberal arts education as a post-grad living in the real world. All the more reason for you to ask yourself, why would this be posted on a website for students of medicine and healthcare? There comes a time when every healthcare practitioner has at some point felt the monotony and the routine that DFW’s speech alludes to as “adult life.” Even as a student, the repetitive and memorization-based nature of the medical curriculum can be hard to cope with each and every day. Through it all, it’s important to reconcile what you believe in and why you do the things you do. People choose this profession and this lifestyle because they believe in something. Sometimes that belief is in healing humanity; other times it is in their own ego. My favorite quote from this speech (which was curiously left out of the video) addressed this concept of belief in a rather poignant way. source