Medical school orientation week: The first day of school

Before starting "real" medical school, my fellow classmates and I spent this past week going through a program designed to acclimate us to our new lives as medical students. As I rode my bike to school for the first time (it took 7 minutes), I reflected on my own excitement for what lay ahead. I have officially matriculated.

Monday, August 10th was dedicated to taking care of mundane but necessary details, like issuing ID badges, setting up e-mail accounts, and confirming immunizations and health insurance. Groups organized alphabetically by last name rotated from station to station, which made the experience feel very much like undergraduate orientation.

All of that waiting around gave us plenty of time for awkward conversations with a fairly predictable script. I complain just a little bit but know that such conversations are inescapable when trying to meet more than 160 people who I will be spending the next four years of my life learning alongside. And for all the repeatability of these conversations, I was wholly impressed by every single person I met: by their accomplishments, by their amicability, and by my eagerness to get to know them better.

The highlight of Monday was getting fitted for our white coats. Real doctors wear long white coats, while medical students are differentiated by wearing short white coats that cut off at the waist. The medical profession is very big on clearly demarcating the pecking order in visible and obvious ways. Some of my classmates said they felt like they were playing dress up, but trying on my short white coat for the first time, I could imagine getting used to it very quickly so that, over the next four years, it would come to feel like a second skin.


The rest of the day was spent meeting our deans and the director of the Human Body block, Dr. Michael Carry, who has been teaching this course for no less than 21 years. He is a phenomenal lecturer. Over the next 9 weeks, I will be memorizing 2038 anatomical structures, their functional relationships, and their clinical relevance. I can't pretend that that's not just a little daunting.


Here are some statistics of my class that Dr. Wagoner, dean of admissions, shared with us:

Of 3660 applications, 573 applicants were interviewed and 260 were given offers of acceptance. My final class size is 160: a quarter are straight out of undergraduate, a fifth are from out of state, and the gender ratio breaks down to 56% men and 44% women. I was also surprised that I fell in the age group with the most number of people.