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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Introduction to the Profession
Harvard Medical School has two programs -New Pathway (NP), with 120 students, and Health Sciences & Technology (HST), with 30 students. NP follows a Problem-Based Learning philosophy in which students learn primarily by analyzing clinical cases, discussion, and self-research. HST is a collaboration between Harvard and MIT, and it's much more focused on frontiers research and lecture-based learning.
For the first two years of medical school, we take no courses together except for Introduction to the Profession, starting today and lasting for two weeks. The purpose of the course is to provide a relaxed introduction to coursework during which we learn to take vital signs, take a basic patient history, shadow doctors, and talk to patients.
HMS is one of the few schools that has a dual program like this, and I think it reflects its dual commitment to patient care and research well.
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