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Grey's Anatomy star Sandra Oh is a real doctor now! Well, an honorary one. Here's what she told Dartmouth's 2025 graduating class
"I didn't even go to college," is not a usual thing for someone with a doctorate to say, but she did spend a decade playing a doctor on TV, so we'll let her off.
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When people watch medical dramas, there is never any real expectation that the doctors on the show will be actual doctors. George Clooney wasn’t performing surgery after filming E.R., and Zach Braff wasn’t giving medical screenings on the set of Scrubs. However, Grey’s Anatomy star Sandra Oh can be referred to as Dr. Oh now – at least, in an honorary fashion.
“I feel like I can at least tell the rest of my family, many of whom are doctors, ‘I’m also a doctor!’” she said with a cheer after Stephen Colbert revealed the picture of Sandra Oh receiving her honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College. “I didn’t have to go to college!”
Sandra Oh, who played Christina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy for ten years, received the honorary doctorate when she gave the commencement speech for Dartmouth College’s 2025 graduating class. Her speech, which can be found on Dartmouth’s website, focused on being as brutally honest about the difficult world that these young graduates are heading out into. “I really tried to be as purposeful and as thoughtful and judicious about what it was you could possibly say to young people at this time. To not only give them inspiration but also to not lie, do you know? To not lie to them and to say it’s very, very, very difficult.”
So what did Sandra Oh tell the graduating class? “I had to really just go into like, what did I learn at this point in my 50s? What did I learn that will help me through very difficult times? And I tried to lead them through a moment of silence, which I think is really, really hard for people to sit in right now. And also kindness and what kindness means, and what actually feeling kindness. Because if you are… if you are not able to access those at the very beginning, that is like the mitochondria of actually how to make change or actually settle yourself into then being able to make a good decision.”
Not a bad bit of advice from Dr. Sandra Oh, who didn’t even have to go to college.
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