Temple University celebrates a new medical school class with white coats and proud parents

Gwen Baraniecki-Zwil beamed with joy from the stage of Temple University’s Performing Arts Center as her father helped her into a white medical coat. Friends, family, and future colleagues cheered as she turned, hugged him, and officially marked the beginning of her journey to become a physician.

Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine on Friday held a white coat ceremony for roughly 200 members of its incoming class. During this rite of passage, medical students were individually called to the stage to put on their first white coat, a symbol of the power and responsibility that comes with their profession. Together, they recited the Geneva Declaration, a modern variation on the classic oath to do no harm.

“It was really meaningful,” Baraniecki-Zwil said after the ceremony. Her father, Alexander Zwil, graduated from Temple’s medical school in 1984. “He was tearing up a little bit,” she said.

A faculty member or an alumni family member helped each medical student into their coat.

One student was assisted by his wife, who wore a baby carrier under her own white coat. Another by their grandmother, in honor of their late alumnus grandfather.

Amy Goldberg, the medical school’s dean, urged each student to be “a sponge” throughout their training and career.

“The awesome responsibility and rare power of medicine will be in your hands,” Goldberg said. “Not today, not tomorrow, but soon enough.”

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Altha Stewart, a psychiatrist and dean at the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, returned to her alma mater to deliver the ceremony’s keynote address.

Her advice to the students: Always mix the science of medicine with humanity. Focus on the patient and not the illness. She congratulated them on the first step toward what can be a long and fulfilling career.

“Welcome to the team,” she said.

On Monday, the first-year medical students will start their anatomy course, the first of many learning experiences they will share. But each person’s path to this point has been different.

Medicine will be Baraniecki-Zwil’s second career. The 29-year-old South Jersey native was a professional dancer, a field in which retirement age is earlier than that of most jobs. She didn’t plan to follow in the footsteps of her parents, both of whom are physicians, but after spending some time working in research, she found herself doing exactly that. She said she is attracted to the depth of knowledge that medicine offers.

“I wasn’t at [age] 3 saying ‘I want to be a doctor,’ ” she said.

Nagendra Dhanikonda, 22, had a more traditional academic path. He left his home in San Ramon, Calif., for undergrad at Washington & Jefferson College in Western Pennsylvania. He graduated this year, after completing his premed requirements and spending summers working as an intern in medical research institutions.

Dhanikonda, whose parents immigrated from India, said he was inspired to become a physician after seeing health inequities when he traveled to visit family in his parents’ homeland.

“I wanted to be able to be in a profession that can help out people who don’t have access to health care,” he said.

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Dhanikonda’s parents initially didn’t like the idea of their son going to medical school. There are no other physicians in his family, and the training seemed long and the profession difficult. But on Friday, his family from California stood next to him to celebrate the beginning of his medical education.

“They say when a son or daughter is born, that’s not when actually you need to celebrate. You celebrate the moment they actually make you proud,” said his father, Uday Dhanikonda, repeating an Indian saying. “This is one of those moments.”