Einstein Welcomes M.D. Class of 2015

August 15, 2011 – (BRONX, NY) – While many in the city leave town for the last two weeks of August, students from across the country and around the world will descend on the Bronx to launch their medical careers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.  One hundred and eighty-three first-year medical students will arrive on Einstein’s Jack and Pearl Resnick campus Monday, August 15 for a week of orientation and welcoming events that will introduce them to the campus, faculty members and each other.

Members of the M.D. class of 2015 hail from 27 U.S. states and two percent are international students – although 18 percent were born in countries other than the United States, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Germany, Ghana, India, the Republic of Korea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Vietnam. The class is composed of 44 percent women. Thirteen percent are from groups underrepresented in medicine. Students range in age from 20 to 40 years old and more than one in four (27 percent) were non-science majors as undergraduates. Six percent are in the combined M.D./Ph.D. program.

And in keeping with family tradition, more than one in five M.D. students has at least one physician-parent.

The opening week’s events kick off with a welcome by Allen M. Spiegel, M.D., the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean of Einstein, and other senior faculty, and includes a sunset boat cruise around New York harbor, a barbeque and scavenger hunt with faculty, and a Meyers-Briggs-type indicator test to help students better understand their personalities and work styles so they can successfully work alone and in teams. Classes begin on Thursday, August 18. The following week, students will participate in the "On Becoming a Physician" ceremony, in which they will be "coated" (given the doctor’s traditional "white coat"). 

The week of August 15 also marks the beginning of the Ph.D. program, which this year welcomes 40 new students. Their orientation schedule includes a "big brother/big sister event," in which new students are paired with those later in their Ph.D. process; the student boat cruise with the M.D. students and a trip to the US Open Tennis Championships.

All students will become part of Einstein''s heralded tradition of teaching compassionate medicine in an environment that stresses academic excellence, community and global service and collaboration.