Earning the White Coat

Rather than receiving their white coats during orientation, as is common at other medical schools, medical students at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth spend the first two months of their training in a clinical clerkship seeing simulated patients where they gain hands-on experience before clothing themselves in the iconic symbol of a doctor. So on September 25, when the Geisel MD Class of 2030 celebrated this rite of passage, they had already been immersed in the core concepts of medicine, and had been taught the importance of compassion, empathy, and respect to earning every patient’s trust.