For Release: October 6, 2009
Contact: David Corriveau, Media Relations Officer, Dartmouth Medical School, at David.A.Corriveau@Dartmouth.edu or 603-653-0771
Dartmouth Welcomes Doctors-to-Be to the Profession
DMS's 84 first-year students donned their
white coats at the Oct. 3 ceremony.
Hanover, N.H.—Seven weeks into their first year at Dartmouth Medical School, the 47 women and 37 men of the Class of 2013 marched into DMS's Kellogg Auditorium and donned the symbol of their new profession at the School's White Coat Ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 3.
But first, they listened to some words of welcome and friendly warning about the privileges and obligations that lie ahead of them - from two members of the Class of 2012, from alumni and alumnae, and from the School's leadership.
While stressing the need for delivering technically excellent care, DMS Dean William R. Green, Ph.D., said, "We're training compassionate doctors."
That point was reinforced by second-year students Sarah K. Fink and David S. Wenger, who told the '13s to expect to learn at least as much outside the classroom and the laboratory as inside those academic spaces. Wenger recalled volunteering over the summer of 2009 at a Mother Teresa clinic in Ethiopia, where bedside manner often counted for more in treating patients than drawing blood and prescribing medication. Barriers of culture and language, he said, "seemed to disappear with the simple comfort of a smile."
Robert C. Bollinger, Jr., M.D., M.P.H., a member of the DMS Class of 1984, shared similar memories. Now director of the Center for Clinical Global Health Education at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bollinger recalled wearing a "space suit" to protect himself - or so the thinking went in the early 1980s - while treating one of New Hampshire's first AIDS patients.
"That was my first dose of humility," Bollinger said. "That humility is going to drive you. . . . Put an extra pocket in that white coat for that humility."
Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim recalls
his days as a medical student, and offers advice
to the class of 2013.
Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim, M.D., Ph.D., recalled receiving his own white coat at Harvard Medical School in the late 1980s. By their third year, he said, he and his classmates "realized that our pockets weren't big enough" to carry all the knowledge they needed on the wards. But, he reassured the DMS first-years, "over time the knowledge will move from your pockets and into your brain." And, added Kim, the coat inspires trust and respect in exam rooms from Hanover to Haiti, from Lebanon, N.H., to Lesotho, Africa.
"They assume you care about human suffering," Kim concluded. "The white coat you start wearing today is going to stay with you for the rest of your life. Welcome to the profession."
The first-years - who were chosen from among nearly 5,300 applicants - found notes of welcome in the pockets of their new coats from DMS graduates across the decades and across the nation.
Some of the students waited till later to read their notes. "I didn't open it yet," said Ellen Stein, at 45 the oldest new M.D.-to-be. "I like to hold off on those things."
Sort of the way she held off on choosing this career path. A 1986 graduate of Dartmouth College, Stein until recently had served as assistant dean for academic and student affairs at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. She started considering the switch to medicine during a dozen years of volunteering as an emergency medical technician - first in the Brattleboro, Vt., area and more recently with an ambulance service based in nearby Fairlee, Vt. With encouragement from DMS's senior advising dean, Joseph O'Donnell, M.D., and from Sue Ann Hennessy, DMS's assistant dean for student affairs, Stein made the leap of faith.
"I was thinking I was going to [the University of Vermont College of Medicine]," Stein said. "But I realized I have a community here already.
"I feel incredibly supported."
-DMS-
