White Coat Ceremony
The white coat ceremony at medical schools is meant to mark the transition from preclinical to clinical years. There has been an increasing trend to present the coats before the start of the first year as the curricula involve patient interactions well before the third year.
At some schools, the white coat ceremony is a huge ordeal. Parents are invited, tents are raised, tears are released. My parents attended my brother's white coat ceremony two years earlier.
At Harvard Medical School it is a little less overstated. We have five societies - Cannon, Peabody, Holmes, and Castle (named after venerable doctors from Harvard and following the New Pathway curriculum) and HST, the program I am in (now named the London society after its founder).
Each society held its own white coat ceremony closed to parents, which meant a cozier atmosphere and less hoopla. The white coat ceremony is a symbolic gesture meant to emphasize the increasing responsibility of the medical student. But I'm not sure that I feel any different having received it since those responsibilities have weighed heavily in my mind.
Here is a picture taken by a classmate of mostly HST students with our esteemed pathologist and teacher, Rick Mitchell to the right. I am standing second from the right.
Will those smiles be replaced by weary, blank stares in the near future?
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August 21st, 2009 - 20:25
You’re right, the white coat ceremony was a big event at my med school. But they tend to be a little over-dramatic here. At the end of Med 2, we even had a ceremony commemorating the start of the clinical years.