“The WhiteCoat I Never Wore: Why You Shouldn’t Miss Yours”
It is the start of October, 2021.
Barely five months after sitting my high school finals, exams that were supposed to happen six months earlier before COVID rewrote the calendar, everything had happened too fast. Finishing exams, getting into the university I believed I was born for, to study medicine and surgery.
The two-week grace period before classes started moved both fast and sluggishly. There was a lot to take in. The culture shock. The beautiful ladies we’d been told will chase us, only to find out I had to do the chasing, and if I told you I succeeded, I’d be lying. But that’s a story for another day.
But there was this one event, the White Coat Ceremony. Almost everyone was talking about it, and somewhere between the chasing and the culture shock, it slipped past me. I have never stopped regretting it.
The FOMO hit after the fact. My roommate’s stories, how they’d enjoyed it, felt inspired, taken the oath, left me regretting it further. Then came the photos. Then the stories of the meals. I had missed a lot.
AMSUN Set to Cloak New Cohort as White Coat Ceremony Returns This Month
Which is exactly why incoming first-year medical students at the University of Nairobi should pay attention this month. The Association of Medical Students of the University of Nairobi (AMSUN) hosts its annual White Coat Ceremony on the 3rd, and it is not an event to let slip by.
The ceremony, a tradition observed at medical schools worldwide, marks a student’s symbolic transition into the medical profession. At its centre is the “cloaking,” senior doctors and faculty personally fitting each new student with a white coat, followed by the taking of an oath committing them to the discipline ahead.
AMSUN, founded in 1967 and now the oldest medical students’ association in Kenya with a membership exceeding 2,500, has run the ceremony since its inaugural staging at the Chandaria Center for Performing Arts, an event addressed by the university’s Deputy Vice Chancellor and the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences.
Last year’s edition drew more than 200 first-years and was addressed by Dr. Michael Magoha, a neurosurgeon and lecturer in the university’s Department of Surgery. Previous ceremonies have also spotlighted AMSUN’s non-academic arms, among them AMSUN Art and the running club, underscoring a recurring theme at these events: that a career in medicine need not come at the expense of personal talent.
Speakers at past ceremonies have repeatedly urged incoming students toward the same principles, consistency, commitment, and the value of peer discussion groups as a support system through the demands of medical training.
Cloaking of first year medical students during the 2025 AMSUN whitecoat ceremony
For the incoming cohort, the ceremony is more than an orientation formality. It is, organisers say, the first tangible marker of a six-year journey now underway, and as I learned the hard way, it does not wait for you to be ready.
To the class joining this year: attend, cloak up, take the oath. Some moments in medical school you get to repeat. This one, you don’t.
