Well it’s been more than month since I have posted anything
here and it’s damn well about time I changed that. I have been incredibly busy
and have been totally absorbed by medical school and all the burdens that go
with moving to a totally new place and getting adjusted to living there. But
now I have begun to settle down into a fairly convenient routine and can give a
good retrospect of the month that just passed.
On August 8, I boarded a painfully early morning flight from
Los Angeles to St. Louis to start medical school at Washington University. The
founders of my school must have been fond of misunderstandings, since its name
provokes a lot of confusion.
“Is it in Washington?”
“Is it in Washington, D.C.?”
These are the two most common follow-up questions I get whenever I
talk to someone not in the medical community. No wonder that in 1976, the
Regents of the university finally sneaked in the qualifier “in St. Louis” to
the school’s name to make it “Washington University in St. Louis.”
Usually its shortened to either WashU or WUStL.
BTW if you haven’t got it by now, the school was named after
our first president.
Orientation was from August 9-12. I was at a slight
advantage at meeting a lot of my new classmates because more than half of the
class had arrived in St. Louis early to do a week-long community health
program. First day went by fairly briskly, and I spent an awful lot of time
shaking hands and smiling and introducing myself. The two most common questions
following introductions – “Where are you from?” and “Where did you do your
undergrad?”
If time permitted, these were usually followed by “Where are
you living right now?”
That evening, the school rented out the entire City Museum
from 6-9 and threw a lavish reception party, replete with an open bar and a
generous dinner. This was the type of affair with waiters circulating in and
out of crowds, carrying trays laden with delicious appetizers and some kind of
wine. The entire top brass showed up, and the Dean of admissions was seated at
my table. I was awestruck. This man was literally directly responsible for my
admission to the school. He was my interviewer way back in November of last
year, and he was the one I wrote to express my interest after being waitlist.
And he was the one who called me the next day to announce the happy news.
There were four other students at the table, and the talk
turned to California. My class has a lot of Californians. The Dean made
a joke about it: “When the creator made the world, he/she took the whole North
American landmass and shook it thoroughly, and all the nuts fell down to
California.”
Hey-O!
The rest of the orientation days were, sadly, neither as
eventful nor as exciting. We were bombarded with lectures and protocols and
forms. Orientation culminated in what has now become a standard practice among
medical schools, the white coat ceremony. It is a fairly recent tradition
(Wikipedia tells me it was first introduced in late 1980’s) that marks the
initiation of new medical students into the medical community. Each student is
given a white coat and the class as a whole recites an oath to uphold the
principles of medicine.
WashU makes us construct our own oath, partly because the
Hippocratic oath is terribly outdated (it includes clauses like "to live in common with him[i.e. teacher] and, if necessary, to share my goods with
him; To look upon his children as my own brothers, to teach them this
art." ) and partly
because the school acknowledges that while the main tenets of medicine may not
change, each new generation of physicians-to-be brings its own set of ideals.
For that purpose, we were split into small groups. Each group, under the
guidance of a faculty mentor, spent two hours brainstorming various ideas worthy
of including in the oath. Two representatives were appointed from each group,
and all the representatives met again to write the final product. If anyone is interested,
here is the oath in full: Oath.
Now normally, I am faintly leery of such displays of
solemnity because I think people take them for granted, thus diluting the
significance of these events. However, I was very impressed with the gravitas
and authenticity of the whole ceremony. Granted, we are all at a very young
stage in our careers, but the boisterious idealism on display at the white coat
ceremony is necessary to sustain the tough years ahead. Plus, everyone’s
parents had a nice reason to feel happy and overwhelmed, which is always good.
This post has grown too long already, and I will talk about classes, daily life
etc. in my next post.
