Class of 2024

At the White Coat Ceremony for the incoming first-year class—a virtual ceremony held Aug. 13—140 members of the Class of 2024 were welcomed into the Columbia community. Via Zoom, the new medical students were welcomed in traditional aspects of the ceremony: They were cloaked in white coats, recited the Hippocratic Oath, and listened to a guest speaker, all from their homes.

Angela Mills, MD, the J.E. Beaumont Professor of Emergency Medicine at CUMC and chair, Department of Emergency Medicine, spoke at this year’s ceremony as the seventh Fern Feldman Anolick-Gold Foundation lecturer. “It is critical of us to remember the enormous privilege and responsibility we have as physicians and physicians in training,” Dr. Mills told the students. “We truly are the safety net of our society at the forefront of social and public health issues, disease, new legislation, and social unrest.”

During the virtual ceremony, students put on their own white coats as their names were announced. After all names were read, the new students shared their screens together on the live feed in a virtual “group photo.”

About the Class of 2024

140 students

113 MD students

12 MD-PhD students

10 Columbia-Bassett students

3 PhD-to-MD students

2 oral and maxillofacial surgery students

68 women/72 men

31 underrepresented minorities (22.1%)

10  first-generation college students (7.1%)

7,297 total applications

878 applicants interviewed

50 colleges represented

35 states represented

9 foreign countries represented