Burnett School of Medicine
The Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at TCU welcomed its sixth cohort of 60 new medical students on Saturday at the traditional White Coat Celebration at TCU’s Legends Club at Amon G. Carter Stadium.
“We are thrilled to welcome our sixth group of Empathetic Scholars® and future physicians,” said Stuart D. Flynn, founding dean of the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU. “This group will begin their medical education journey in our brand-new medical education building in the heart of Fort Worth’s Medical Innovation District just steps away from all our clinical partners. This group has a distinctive opportunity to learn to practice medicine with empathy and amass deep medical knowledge from physicians and patients in our community.”
More than 6,590 applied to be one of 60 medical students selected for the class of 2028. The first-year medical students represent 18 states with more than a quarter from Texas.
Fifty-seven percent of the class self-identifies with one or more of the three school defined diversity domains: race/ethnicity, LGBTQ, or socio-economic limitation.
Eight of the students are undergraduate students from TCU.
First-year medical student Sylvie Inkindi was selected by her peers to represent the class of 2028 at the White Coat Celebration. Inkindi worked as a public health microbiologist with the Los Angeles County Public Health Lab before coming to medical school.
“We may have taken different paths, but we all find ourselves here today finally donning our white coats.,” Inkindi said. “This moment represents the culmination of years of hard work, but it also marks the beginning of a lifelong commitment to the noble profession of medicine.”
Every year, white coat ceremonies are conducted by medical schools across the United States. New medical students receive their short white coats signifying the beginning of their journey to achieve the long white coat, when they are physicians, according to the American Medical Association.
Burnett School of Medicine at TCU students received their white coats in front of faculty, staff, family, and friends. The medical school puts its own twist on the traditional celebration by having family members gather around each medical student to help them put on their white coat for the first time.
The Burnett School of Medicine graduated its second class of medical students in May. The school’s novel Empathetic Scholar® curriculum prepares students to be compassionate physicians with a breadth of medical knowledge to tackle rapid advances in medicine.
The medical school’s bold mission is to transform medical education by emphasizing communications training, partnering students with patients and physicians from their first day through the Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship model, and world-class simulation and technology training using the Microsoft HoloLens® and HoloAnatomy® mixed-reality learning experience.
Students are also challenged to become lifelong learners capable of critical inquiry through the Scholarly Pursuit & Thesis (SPT) four-year research project that every student is required to complete upon graduation.
“The way we’ve designed this forward-thinking curriculum puts our medical students at the forefront of medical innovation,” Flynn said. “They will be equipped with unique skills to deliver patient care now and into the future while having the ability to adapt to new medical advances as they arise.”
