Every year, the NYMC community comes together to celebrate the School of Medicine White Coat Ceremony, an iconic ritual that emphasizes compassionate, collaborative, scientifically excellent care from the very first day of training in medical school. The Arnold P. Gold Foundation established this tradition as a way to highlight the importance of humanism in all care of patients.
The White Coat Ceremony is a rite of passage that marks the beginning of each medical student's career. Our ceremony creates a psychological, intellectual, and ethical contract for the profession and promotes empathy in the practice of medicine from the very start of medical training.
First-year medical students are donned in their white coats during the ceremony for the first time by NYMC deans and faculty members in the presence of their families and friends.
The ceremony concludes with the students reciting an oath of their own creation, emphasizing the qualities of a physician they consider most important.