Today we recognize you with pride and expectation. Your family, friends, colleagues, and teachers all gather to honor your accomplishments and to send you forward with our support and most heartfelt wishes for successful and rewarding careers in the health sciences. We also are gathered to bid you a fond farewell, for your graduation represents not only your accomplishments, but our careers, energies, and lifetime mission. The challenges that you face seem more complex and uncertain than those

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... our teachers faced upon their graduations. Since you graduated from high school, health sciences advances are astounding. I will highlight a few: Advances in neurobiology, genetics, neurosciences, pharmacology, the health systems revolution, biomedical ethics, primary care, managed care, information technology, treatments for increasing cultural diversity in America, interdisciplinary services, gender issues, and public health programs. At our own Health Sciences Campuses, forty-eight pioneering achievements are presented on the plaque "Advancing Human Health: CU' s Many Achievements." For example, our HSC faculties performed the first liver transplant and were the first to identify the battered child syndrome -two very different but unique accomplishments. We trust that we have prepared you well in knowledge, skills, and attitude for a career in the health sciences. And yet your teachers alone cannot feel solely responsible for your professional attitude since others here -parents, other family members, friends, and most importantly, yourself -all influence the attitudes you take from this center of higher education to your health sciences profession. What attitudes do you need to succeed? Curiosity, dedication, honesty, loyalty, adaptability, flexibility, sensitivity, persistence, optimism, and courage, to name a few. So be curious and never stop learning. Be dedicated and always work hard. Be honest to yourself and to your patients. Be loyal first to your patients and then to your personal interest. Be adaptable and adjust to new opportunities. Be flexible and also consider the alternative. Be sensitive and "walk in the shoes of your patients." Be persistent and finish the job. Be optimistic and approach each task with confidence. Be courageous and ask the tough questions to reach the unique conclusions. In the Colorado image, go climb a mountain and know that we are proud of you and wish you well.