(for the most part) Professionally Qualified
Cohort 8's graduation speech, 8/13/24
Two weekends ago, Cohort 8 graduated from POCA Tech. It was a lovely event that they planned themselves. (DIY all the way!) I thought I’d share the speech they asked me to give. You’ll have to imagine all the whooping and cheering for Cohort 8’s various accomplishments. But it went something like this:
So this is where we say bon voyage to Cohort 8.
But first, I want to talk about a gift that Cohort 8 recently gave to POCA Tech faculty and staff. This t-shirt, that says: for the most part…Professionally Qualified.
This is the shirt Cohort 8 wore — all of them — to their clinic exit exam.
Friends and family of Cohort 8 students, I imagine you might have some questions. And yes, there’s a story behind it.
We need a bit of context — to put Cohort 8 in the proper frame — and some of that involves bureaucracy, for which I apologize. I’ll try to make it brief and not put you all to sleep. POCA Tech opened as a brand new acupuncture school in 2014. There’s a sort of weird catch-22 in being a new school, in that acupuncture schools need to be accredited, but you can’t even start working on that until the school is up and running. So the first few years of a school’s life are really dominated by jumping through bureaucratic hoops. When you’re a tiny little school like POCA Tech that runs on a shoestring, it’s a big deal to figure out the balance between satisfying regulatory requirements, on the one hand, while on the other, providing the learning opportunities we think are important for future community acupuncturists.
Anyway, that bureaucratic process overshadowed the school experience for Cohorts 1 through 4. We got fully accredited in August 2018, which was a year ahead of schedule — because we were in a big hurry to be done with it. So we had only been fully accredited for about a year and a half when the pandemic hit. Cohort 4 graduated in a park with everybody six feet apart, wearing masks. And Cohorts 5, 6 and 7’s school experience was deeply affected by COVID — we were all just trying to get through the pandemic in one piece. Cohort 8, though, because they started in 2021, arrived at a time when we were relatively confident that we’d made it through the worst part (of both the pandemic and the accreditation process) and now we could get on with figuring out what we really wanted to do.
Cohort 8 really helped us explore that. As you might expect of a group of people who started a graduate program at a tiny, weird little school in the fall of 2021, they were game. They were brave. They were up for anything.
You’re probably wondering what I mean by anything. I made a list! Cohort 8, please chime in if I leave anything out.
Three members of Cohort 8 (Jen, Tia and Tiffany) did their very first day of clinic internship off-site, in a pop up clinic, as part of a very new, very experimental relationship with Linfield University’s School of Nursing. I was supervising and they were brand new interns. Which I actually forgot about until they reminded me, yeah, this is our first day. Whoops. They did such a great job, it was easy to forget.
Speaking of pop-ups, Jemila created a relationship with a community organization that runs a housing program for older adults who are transitioning off the street. Running a regular pop-up community acupuncture clinic in a low income transitional housing program, as far as I know, is something that nobody’s done before. Certainly POCA Tech hadn’t done it before. But she and Andrew have been doing it for months now, with Whitsitt supervising. Currently Jemila’s working on handing the project off to future interns. (Heads up, Cohorts 9 and 10).
Cohort 8 is also distinguished by having not one but two new Away Clinics, which are relationships that students set up with established community acupuncture clinics outside of Portland to allow them to do their internship hours there. Susie did that with Steve Kingsbury of Ashland Community Acupuncture in Ashland, Massachusetts. Jen, Tiffany and Tia did it with Rob Singer of Acupuncture for the People in Eugene. Both of those clinics are hoping to work with future POCA Tech interns because the Cohort 8 interns did such a good job of breaking that ground.
And of course, the big leap into space — Cohort 8’s Capstone Project of changing the law in Oregon to make 5NP, also known as acudetox, legal. All of Cohort 8 did amazing work on this initiative. I have to single out Noni, though, for organizing an incredibly successful pop-up clinic at the state capitol building, where a whole lot of legislative staff got to experience 5NP for the first time. When Cohort 8 started their Capstone, 5NP in Oregon was just a hope; as they’re graduating, we have a committed sponsor to introduce the bill in the 2025 legislative session and a whole raft of community organizations in support of it. Cohort 8, you did an amazing job of holding space for this work, which is going to be meaningful to so many people.
I promise I’m getting to the t-shirts.
The bureaucratic part of running a school always comes around again eventually, and Cohort 8 was in their second year when we were in our process of re-accreditation, which involved a site visit. It’s a big hoop to jump, for a tiny little school with a tiny little budget. There are a lot of expenses associated with a re-accreditation cycle, various costs for various things, and when we totaled them all up they came to about $35,0001. Yikes. So we said to the students: we need to raise $35,000, shall we give it a try? And once again they were game, they said yes, and Tiffany volunteered to lead the effort. You all are probably familiar with this part of the story because the students were probably hitting you up for donations. Spoiler alert: our campaign for re-accreditation raised $37,000, thanks to Tiffany’s leadership.
Having raised the money, we had to schedule a time for our site visit, which involved (among other things) four site visitors coming to the school and observing classes during a teaching module. We asked ourselves, hmm, whose module should it be? Which cohort is best suited to handle this particular challenge? It was a no-brainer. We scheduled the site visit for Cohort 8’s March 2023 module. (Sorry, Cohorts 9 and 7).
I’m not going to say much about the site visit itself. We went into it feeling prepared, or as prepared as we could be. POCA Tech’s relationship with the rest of the acupuncture profession is, I guess you could say, fraught — we’ve had some hairy moments with peer evaluators in the past. But we’d put in a lot of work and planning ahead of time, so we thought this visit would go well.
It did not.
I mean, the part where Noni brought them doughnuts every day went well, and their interviews with students — including Noni talking about student government — went really well. And of course Cohort 8 was extremely polite and attentive when the site visitors sat in on classes. For anybody who’s wondering: we did get accredited for seven more years.
Anyway, once a site visit is over, the school gets a report from the visitors that we then have to respond to. We shared that report with everyone. One of the highlights — which reflected the overall tone of the visit — was this quote: “The administration and academic leadership” (that’s us) “are for the most part professionally qualified for their positions”.
For the most part.
I can’t remember who said: that should go on a t-shirt. I think it was Noni. (Noni thinks it was me.)
Anyway, I love that Cohort 8 did, in fact, put it on a t-shirt, for so many reasons. (Not least, the sheer cheekiness. The sass. As Sonya would say, okay sassy!) But a big reason, that’s pertinent to your graduation today, is that success as an acupuncturist isn’t actually about being professionally qualified in somebody else’s eyes.
Success is more about qualifying yourself. It’s less about getting an external stamp of approval from the authorities and more about making an internal decision to trust yourself. It’s about offering yourself a little faith and then being willing to nurture and grow it. Yes, you need to go through all the steps to convince the state to give you an acupuncture license, and you’re all about to do that. Beyond that process, though, once you graduate from school, the most important endorsement you need, the most important endorsement you’ll ever get, is your own.
As a community acupuncturist who will be either employed by or in charge of a small business, you’re volunteering to face some of the most difficult parts of our society, so you’ll always be coming up against things that test you and challenge your capacities. And so you’ll always be discovering that you’re capable of more than you thought you were.
Which is what you’ve all been doing, as students, throughout your time at POCA Tech.
All of you are absolutely qualified to go out and use acupuncture to change a lot of people’s lives for the better. A big part of growing your faith in yourself — and in acupuncture — is knowing that you don’t have to be perfect in order to deliver profound relief to a lot of people. You don’t need to know everything. You certainly don’t need to impress other acupuncturists. I kind of like “for the most part” — even though it was said begrudgingly and disdainfully — because the most part, actually, is a lot. It can go a long way, for you and for your patients.
You just have to be good enough and willing enough. And you already are, all of you. I hope when you look at your t-shirts you think: for the most part is plenty, and I have everything I need.
Because you do.
And I hope you’re leaving this program with appreciation for your own bravery, your own tenacity, your own faith in putting yourself out there and trying new things. You’ve demonstrated so much courage in the last three years. It’s been a real honor to watch you stretch yourselves and discover that you’re capable of much more than you thought, and maybe more than other people expected of you. I hope you spend some time enjoying your accomplishments, giving yourselves a lot of credit, and being proud of what you’ve done. Cohort 8, you’re leaving POCA Tech in better shape than you found it, and we’re going to miss you.
Now go forth and punk.
Actually it was $34,600:
$4000 -- what we pay our accreditors to read the 115 page report we wrote
$7600 -- the fee to participate in a site visit where they come to see if the report was accurate
$10,000 -- the cost of having a financial audit from a specialized CPA firm (separate from our taxes) to go with our report
$8000 -- the basic annual dues we pay our accreditor
$5000 -- travel and lodging for the site visitors