The Speech I Didn't Give:
The moment I stopped hiding my medical school rejections in a room full of future doctors
By Dr. Rene Roberts, MD, MS, FAAFP | TEDx & Keynote Speaker | Board-Certified Family Medicine Physician
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In August 2022 I was asked to give the keynote at the I Am Abel Foundation's Mentor Mentee Match Day Celebration.
If you don't know the event, Match Day is the day incoming students in the Urban Bridges Medical Mentoring Program are paired with their physician mentors. The students range from high school sophomores to post-baccalaureate students. Every one of them wants to be a doctor. The founder and CEO asked me to speak and gave me free rein on the topic.
I Planned to Play It Safe
Free rein is a generous gift and I did what most people do with it. I wrote the safe version. The happy version. Not one word about being rejected from medical school fifty times, and nothing about the two board exams I failed.
It was a good speech. Medicine is a calling. Medicine is a privilege. You are going to change lives. Every word of that is true, and I had a specific reason for choosing it. Look at who was in that room. High school and college students. Kids who were giddy about this. Eager, bright, lit up, absolutely certain they are destined to don the white coat.
And in the same breath, nothing was more horrifying to me than scaring off a room full of aspiring doctors with my story of rejection after rejection. Why would anyone be motivated to sign up for this knowing what really happened to me? That was it. My mind was made up.
That was the version of the story I told myself, anyway. The honest version is that I was terribly ashamed, and underneath the shame sat a smaller, uglier fear: that no one in that room would take me seriously. Who am I to talk candidly about becoming a doctor when I almost didn't become one? I simply couldn’t cope with that audience knowing what actually happened to me as a pre-med, or what happened to me in medical school. After all, I had been carrying it for well over a decade and I had gotten very good at carrying it discreetly.
They Named Me Instructor of the Year
So I got up and stood at the podium with my safe speech, and lasted all of about sixty seconds. I froze.
But I have to back up, because something happened before I spoke that I didn't see coming.
They gave me an award.
Outstanding Instructor of the Year. Saturday Morning Professor, which is what they call the physicians who teach the Saturday sessions for the Urban Bridges Medical Mentoring Program. Nobody warned me. They called my name, I walked up, and one of the students I mentored at that time handed me a large, hefty plaque with my name on it in gold letters, honoring exceptional leadership and instruction.
I was still holding it when the whole thing came apart.
Here is what it feels like to be handed an award for excellence while carrying what I was carrying. I felt convicted. Not modest, not embarrassed. Convicted. I could no longer stand in front of that room accepting a plaque for exceptional instruction while every person in it believed a version of me that was not true. They thought they were about to hear from a woman who had done this the clean way. I held the plaque in one hand and the weight of over a decade of my buried story in the other, and I could not hold onto both any longer.
The time had come.
I froze. My tear ducts started to burn. This wasn’t stage fright. I've spoken in front of plenty of rooms. I froze because my preplanned agenda was stalling and conviction grabbed hold of my throat demanding Tell them the truth.
In my mind I said no. Standing at that podium, I negotiated with myself. I'm in the middle of something. I have remarks right here. Let me finish this and we can talk about it later.
Tell them what actually happened to you.
The room went quiet in that particular way a room goes quiet when nobody can tell whether the pause is intentional. I've wondered since whether some of them thought it was a device. A dramatic beat before the real speech resumed.
Then I started crying. One tear after the other. Making matters worse, I had not worn waterproof mascara, which should tell you just how unplanned this was.
Fifty Rejections, Out Loud
And I told them about sitting at a desk in Indianapolis.
I told them I applied to twenty medical schools my first cycle and did not receive a single secondary application. No interviews. Not one. I told them I applied to thirty more the following year and got the same answer from every school. I told them instead of being offered a seat in an incoming first year medical student class, I was offered an unplanned detour through a Masters program in a city where I did not know a single soul. No guarantee attached, and I had about five weeks to pack up my life and move to Indianapolis, Indiana.
I told them I failed Step 1, my first ever medical licensing exam. And then I told them I sat for it again and failed it again, the second time by three points.
I told them I got pulled from my clinical rotations because my exam failures meant I hadn't met the requirement to advance. That I did not graduate with my class. That I sat at that desk and asked God to take my life.
He didn't. I'm still here, and I'll come back to that year later in this series, because it needs more room than I can give it here.
And I told them the part that had cost me the most: nobody knew. Not my friends. Not my classmates. Not my parents, who were waiting to hear about graduation, proud of the first doctor in the family.
Then Came More Tears, and Not Just Mine
Here is what I braced for. Pity, or the thing that's worse than pity, where people stop meeting your eyes.
Here is what happened. The room started crying with me.
Not just the students. Grown men were weeping. Physicians, some of them mentors in the program. Sponsors, people who write checks to keep this foundation running, who had come to a celebration and were not expecting any of this. I stood up there looking out at a room of accomplished people with their hands over their faces, and I understood something I have not stopped thinking about since.
I was not the only one in that room carrying something.
Then the students came up afterward, and what they said was not what I expected either. They weren't offering sympathy. What most of them described was closer to relief. More than one of them put it as being able to breathe, like they had been holding something in for a long time and were finally allowed to set it down.
That's what it was. Permission. Permission to have a real story with struggle in it, and to say so out loud.
I think about the timing of it and it still gets me. Match Day. The day these students are handed a mentor. And the most useful thing I had to give was the thing I had spent fourteen years making sure nobody could see.
I knew standing in that room that God had called me to the stage. Not someday, not eventually. Right then. He needed me to tell this story so the ones coming up behind me could make it through too.
I say often that I thank God I don't look like what I've been through. People meet me now and they see the years in practice, a Castle Connolly Top Doctor listing, television segments, a TEDx talk. They see an outcome and assume a clean path.
The path was not clean. For most of my career I believed that was the shameful part.
It was the useful part. It was just useless while it stayed hidden.
That was the first speech I ever gave as my unfiltered self. Everything I have done on a stage since started in that room.
That plaque is on my wall. Outstanding Instructor of the Year, 2022. They handed it to me before they knew any of it, which means the person who earned it was always the person with fifty rejections and two failed board exams in her history. That was never actually in question.
I was the only one in the room who thought it was.
And the message I have carried since is the one that room needed, and the one I needed fourteen years earlier at a desk in Indianapolis.
Struggle doesn't disqualify you. Shame doesn't disqualify you. Failure doesn't disqualify you.
What Comes Next
This is post 1 of seven in my series "What Doctors Don't Say Out Loud," drawn from my conversation on the Healing Medicine Podcast with Dr. Jesse Mahoney. Listen to the full episode here.
Next in the series: Why failure is data, not a character flaw.
Dr. Rene Roberts, MD, MS, FAAFP is a board-certified Family Medicine physician, Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians, three-time Castle Connolly Top Doctor (2024, 2025, 2026), and TEDx & keynote speaker. Creator of the L.Y.M.I.T.S. Method™, she is a nationally recognized medical media expert and leading voice in healthcare equity, medical education reform, and resilience. She mentors aspiring physicians through the Urban Bridges Medical Mentoring Program.
Speaking inquiries: www.drrenemd.com/speaking Follow along on social media: @drrenemd www.drrenemd.com
