A milestone graduation at VTC
It was “a sweet moment,” U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine said, delivering the commencement address Saturday for the first graduating class of the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.
Sweet, indeed, for the 40 graduates, all with residencies safely secured, commencing new lives as resident doctors.
Sweet, surely, for two of the region’s visionary leaders — Virginia Tech President Charles Steger, who is retiring next month, and Dr. Ed Murphy, at the time the CEO of Carilion Clinic — who together hatched the idea for a joint public-private medical school and research institute.
Sweet for Kaine, whose speaking honors dated from his term as governor, when he supported a state bond issue that included the critical $59 million needed to build the medical school in Roanoke.
The moment was sweetest of all, though, for Roanoke, whether residents were fully aware of its significance or not: VTC’s first class commencement marked a beginning too, of sorts, for the city and surrounding area.
The medical school’s early success is a bright signal that the region at last has found firm footing in a high-tech niche of the New Economy, one that promises opportunities for well-paying jobs in medicine, medical research and related fields.
Fourteen years into the New Millenium (13 years for those cultural outliers who insist on numerical accuracy), Roanoke can envision itself as something other than a railroad town whose railroad has departed, whose manufacturing base has been scattered by global winds.
Whose aging population assures its future as a relatively comfortable place to retire, but little more.
With the graduation of VTC’s first class, the school is only now eligible for full accreditation. But it already can count its success in other ways: The entire graduating class succeeded in getting residencies, more than half to programs that were their first choice. Students scored well on medical licensing exams. And applications to the school have more than doubled since it opened, allowing it to be selective in those it accepts.
Which bodes well for its future, and the future of the public-private venture that brought it about: a collaboration between Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic that established both the school and a research institute but a stone’s throw from Carilion-Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
It is a synergistic relationship between a university that lacked a school of medicine to attract medical research dollars, the better to boost its ranking as a research institution, and a new clinic that needed a medical school and a stronger research component to attract the specialists it must have to offer patients the collaborative care such a model requires.
It is a huge, daring undertaking that continues to carry financial risk for Carilion and the community — the clinic is the Roanoke Valley’s largest private employer.
Indicators this week have all been upbeat, though. Carilion just reported a second straight year of profitability after four years of losses.
And who can deny that Steger and Murphy’s shared vision has brought the region something that had eluded it: the big opportunity to change its future, with both of their institutions the stronger for it.
###