FIU’s First Medical Students to Receive their White Coats in Ceremony

MIAMI – The FIU Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine will hold its first White Coat Ceremony on Friday, Aug. 7, establishing a tradition through which its medical students will formally begin their journey toward becoming physicians.

The ceremony will be held at 4 p.m. at the Wertheim Performing Arts Center, located at Florida International University’s Modesto A. Maidique Campus (MMC), 11200 S.W. 8^th St., Miami. A reception will follow at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, also at MMC.

Dr. Darrell G. Kirch, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, will deliver the keynote address. Other speakers at the ceremony will include Dr. Herbert Wertheim, for whom the medical school was named in recognition of his historic $20 million gift; FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg; and Dr. John A. Rock, founding dean of the Wertheim College of Medicine and senior vice president of medical affairs.

“In welcoming its first students, the Wertheim College of Medicine is engaging our community on key health issues, preventing disease and illness,” said FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg. “FIU fought to establish South Florida’s only public medical school and, thanks to the outstanding leadership of the Wertheim College of Medicine and the talented students who make up the inaugural class, our medical school promises to revolutionize medical education in the United States while helping improve access to health care in our community.”

FIU’s diverse inaugural class, 43 students chosen from a pool of 3,332 applicants, includes Florida’s first liver transplant recipient. Once they graduate in 2013, many of the students will be the first doctors in their families while one student will be the 28^th in three generations of her family. Some of the students immigrated to the United States and had to learn English before they could even pursue their studies and others are the children of immigrants. In addition to the U.S., other countries where students were born include Argentina, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, India, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Romania. Profiles and pictures of the students are available at the “43 Dreams That Will Touch Thousands” website.

“These extraordinary students will be our trailblazers, the ones who will set high standards for other students to follow and who will one day serve as an example of the new kind of doctor we are educating at FIU – socially aware and responsive physicians who will practice medicine in a compassionate and comprehensive manner,” College of Medicine Founding Dean Dr. John A. Rock said. “The White Coat Ceremony is their rite of passage, their formal introduction to the art of healing. Once they put their coats on, they will be changed forever.”

At the ceremony, each student will receive a traditional white medical coat. As is customary, the student coats will be short in order to distinguish them from doctors when doing their clinical rotations at hospitals. Each student also will receive a stethoscope, donated by Leon Medical Centers. In 2008, Benjamín León Jr., founder of Leon Medical Centers, donated $10 million to the College of Medicine to establish the Benjamín León, Jr. Family Center for Geriatric Research and Education and the Leon Medical Centers Eminent Scholars Chair in Geriatrics.

A symbolic event introduced in 1993, the White Coat Ceremony was established after a group of distinguished physicians, medical educators and community leaders formed the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.

The Foundation concluded that the beginning of a student’s journey into medicine is the best time to influence standards of professionalism, humanistic values and behavior. More than 100 medical schools in the United States now hold White Coat Ceremonies.

Media contact: Madeline Baró, 305-348-2234

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About the FIU Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine:
The College of Medicine was approved in 2006 by the Florida Board of Governors and the Florida Legislature.  In 2008, it received preliminary accreditation by the Liaison Committee for Medical Education of the AAMC and admitted its first class in August 2009. Among the innovative elements of the FIU College of Medicine is a program called NeighborhoodHELP™, which will send medical students along with their counterparts in social work, nursing and public health, into the community. The FIU College of Medicine is expected to have a multi-billion-dollar economic impact on Miami-Dade County, bringing thousands of jobs to the area and eventually contributing millions to the state coffers every year. For more information visit http://medicine.fiu.edu/

About FIU:

Florida International University was founded in 1965 and is Miami’s only public research university. With a student body of more than 38,000, its 17 colleges and schools offer more than 200 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs in fields such as engineering, international relations and law. More than 100,000 FIU alumni live and work in South Florida. FIU has been classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a “High Research Activity University”. In August 2009, FIU welcomed the inaugural class of the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine. For more information about FIU, visit http://www.fiu.edu.