Coats over their arms, third-year medical students filing into a tent on the BU Medical Campus Talbot Green May 2 for their in-person White Coat Ceremony. They’d had a pandemic-mandated virtual ceremony in August 2020, and Monday’s in-person ceremony was timed to coincide with the beginning of their third year, when their studies transition to clinical rotation. 

CAMED

Finally, a Two-Year-Delayed In-Person White Coat Ceremony for School of Medicine Entering Class of 2020

Celebrating a medical school tradition after pandemic forced a virtual original ceremony

On May 2, Alex Seren stood in a whirlwind of activity under a large white tent on the Boston University Medical Campus Talbot Green. His fellow third-year medical students greeted one another, their families, and friends amid the din of hundreds of conversations and flashes from cell phone cameras.

Seren (MED’24) smiled broadly when asked about participating in his delayed in-person White Coat Ceremony, two years after he started at MED. The tradition symbolizes the entrance into the study of medicine, but the pandemic forced the event to be virtual for the 2020 entering class.

In August 2020, white coats embroidered with their names were mailed to the entering students, and they donned them in relative isolation, some alone on the video screen, some helped by a parent, partner, or friend tugging the coat into place for the camera.

“We all went through a lot of trials and tribulations to get into medical school and to have that moment where you can celebrate that achievement,” Seren said. “I felt we really didn’t get that, that moment when you can say, ‘Wow, I did it.’”

“But this makes up for it,” he said, casting an appreciative eye around the crowded tent.

When her coat came in the mail in 2020, Bailie Jackson (MED’24) said, it meant she had arrived. “All of our lives we dreamed of being in medical school and being a doctor, and this white coat signified that first step,” she said. After nearly two years in classrooms, hospitals, and clinics her coat was suitably broken in, a bit rumpled, sporting an intractable stain or two.

“It’s gotten a lot of wear and tear, but it still holds everything you need,” Jackson said.

Don’t dwell on past losses, Angela Jackson, MED associate dean of students, advised the students during Monday’s celebration.

“One cannot rewind the clock,” she said, but learn from the experience and move forward.

As faculty assisted the MED students with their coats, cheers went up, an indication that what could have been just another ritual, a symbolic afterthought, was important to these students.

“It was really special for us to be able to meet together and say the Hippocratic Oath, to remind us of the career we’re embarking on,” said Sara Shoushtari (CAS’22, MED’24).

Karen Antman, MED dean and Medical Campus provost, noted that the delayed ceremony was just the second time the class had gathered together (the other was at an ice cream social as their second year began).

The May 2 ceremony was timed to mark another important transition: the beginning of the medical students’ third year, when their studies transition to clinical rotations. Antman cautioned that they would be exposed to some unsettling cases that could deeply affect them.

“The faculty worry if students don’t react to what they see in their transition from student to physician,” she said.

Guest speaker Jessie Gaeta, former chief medical officer at Boston Health Care for the Homeless, a nonprofit providing direct care at more than 80 sites throughout Boston, said the white coat, “with its crisp outline and square shoulders, the bright bold patches on the sleeves,” represents seriousness, solemnity, knowledge, and expertise, especially to the suffering patient.”

The coat “even resembled, to my young eye, a superhero cape,” said Gaeta, who is also a MED assistant professor of medicine. But she challenged the students, who will now spend most of their time with patients, to overcome the images of doctor privilege, paternalism, and racism that the coat has also come to represent in the eyes of many of the underserved and the homeless.

Antman told the students that what they’d experienced during the pandemic would ultimately benefit them:

“Your unique experiences in medicine, that you certainly did not anticipate when you applied to medical school, required creativity, adaptability, and commitment, all traits that will undoubtedly make you better physicians.”