First Week & White Coat Ceremony

So the first week of medical school is officially over and it was quite something! There were many new faces, all new professors, and an insane amount of information. Thankfully everyone (especially upper semesters) are very helpful and willing to take the time to help you out. There is a huge sense of community with this school because we are all far away from home and have to become each others support network.

We have classes everyday from 8 to 3 except on thursdays where we have it until 515. The classes are two hour blocks with a ten minute break halfway through. We also have 45 minutes for lunch, unless one of the professors happens to run late on lecture, which seems to happen often. So far classes are great and the classrooms have very comfy chairs and tons of screens so everyone can see the lecture slides. The rooms are usually very cold which is nice because it can get pretty sweltering and humid outside and it is much easier to concentrate in the cold.

Aside from lecture classes this week has also involved the first anatomy lab. I just want to say that it is quite an honour that we are given by the people who donate their bodies to further our education. I will never be able to thank this person or their families but the best I can do is honour them and work my hardest to learn from them. They are our greatest teachers and for them I have the utmost respect.


This has become quite a rigorous schedule and it starts pretty early. Luckily, however, getting up for class in time has posed no problem because I have a rooster that lives just outside my window (which is on the ground floor). He likes to wake us up at no later than 6 am, often he starts at 4 but I am usually still sleepy enough by that point to turn over and go back to sleep. Aside from our resident rooster (who I will try and catch a picture of later because he is very pretty) we also have various chickens and goats wandering around. It may be very different from Canada but it is starting to feel like home, goats and all. Also because we got our coffee from cafe luna who imports green coffee beans and then batch roasts to order, it is GREAT coffee!

Sept 2012 Class - 112 people, im dead center in the
bottom row

The end of first week culminated in a ceremony called the White Coat Ceremony where we all don our short white coats and repeat an oath as a class in the same form as the hippocratic oath in which we promise to conduct ourselves in a professional manor and respect the trust that is given to us by our future patients. We walk across the classroom in front of our teachers and peers and introduce ourselves and say a little bit about our backgrounds. We then are assisted into the white coat by one of our teachers.  It was very nice and it gave us a chance to get to know more of our classmates who we may not have had the chance to meet otherwise. There also happened to be a welcome back party where we got to meet the rest of the upper semesters. It was a very fun night!

Now I have lots of studying to do!

PS: I found a guava tree outside of my dorm and they are just starting to ripen! YUM! I wish I could put smell on here, it smells so good!

Before with N.