For Monica Rho, 2005 was the year she would become a doctor. It had seemed like an arbitrary date, far in the future. But on Friday, at the Feinberg School of Medicine’s graduation, it was finally time.

“I’ve been working toward this for so long,” she said. “2005 always seemed like such a long time away, and here it is.”

For Rho and other students in the Honors Program in Medical Education, graduation was the culmination of seven years at Northwestern. This year about 60 students graduated from the program, said Eve Veis, HPME coordinator.

Students apply to HPME as seniors in high school, committing themselves at the age of 17 or 18 to a career in medicine. Most HPME students receive a bachelor’s degree after three years at the Evanston campus, and then are automatically admitted to Feinberg where they spend their last four years of school.

HPME graduates had a different college experience than the rest of the 166 medical students who also received degrees at the Navy Pier Grand Ballroom.

They were part of a smaller community, and their transition to medical school was different than that of other students, students said.

As undergraduates, HPME students were just familiar faces to each other. The only time they gathered as a group was for quarterly dinners, Veis said. They took classes with other NU students and they had various majors.

But when they started medical school, those 60 familiar faces provided comfort, Rho said.

“I felt like I was going in with a built-in support structure,” she said.

Two other students from Rho’s high school were also in HPME. They have been together for 11 years, from the first day of high school to medical school graduation, and have become very close, she said.

“I would say that my closest friends are the ones that I’ve been with the longest, and those are HPME,” said HPME graduate Andrew Wu.

Rho said she would miss the HPME students, even those she had not been close to.

“I think I kind of took them for granted, and now they’re scattering to the winds, and it’s really sad,” Rho said. “The faces I’ve seen for the last seven years, they’re all going to be scattered across the country.”

HPME students also spent a lot more time together once they got to medical school because they were younger than the rest of the students, HPME graduate Anand Shah said.

Already admitted to medical school, HPME students did not have to take the MCAT. Together they took stressful courses and learned the ropes of taking high pressure medical school exams.

That hard work was rewarded as they received their diplomas Friday.

Despite the differences in how they got to graduation, Shah said he felt the same as every other graduate at the ceremony.

“Once you get here, we’re all going through the same struggles and the same difficulties,” Shah said. “We’re just glad to have made it through and I think that’s pretty much how everyone else feels.”

Reach Diana Samuels at [email protected].

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