One day they will be doctors. And among their ranks, there are surely those who will lay claim to the next great discovery or breakthrough.
Students looked for their next clue among the library's stacks.
But for now, they are first-years, new to Weill Cornell Medical College, and maybe even New York City, and probably still a little unsure in their new home.
To help ease a bit of that uncertainty, the library staff at the Medical College organized a group treasure hunt to familiarize the class of 2012 with the computers, journals and stacks of the Medical College library.
Meeting in Uris Auditorium on Aug. 28, just two days after receiving their white coats, the first-year students were separated into teams of about 10.
After a week of activities designed to familiarize the students with the school and each other before classes begin, some were still meeting for the first time as they settled into their treasure hunt teams, sharing stories from their undergrad years and home towns.
After an overview on the library and its services from Helen-Ann Brown Epstein, head of Education and Outreach, the teams set out for the library, working their way through clues and tasks designed to teach them the library's online catalog system, Tri-Cat, which includes the books, journals, theses and video material of Weill Cornell, as well as those of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University and the Hospital for Special Surgery.
Maps helped them figure out the library's layout.
The exercise also incorporated PubMed, a bibliographic database of citations to the published literature of the biomedical sciences, which contains 18 million records dating back to 1949.
With library laptops in hand, the teams rushed from post to post, answering questions, exploring the stacks and even learning about the library's food, drink and cell phone rules.
Information Access Service staff members Kevin Pain and Judy Stribling.
Team 8, made up of Liz Franzek, Dan Wiznia, Schlomo Minkowitz, Stephanie Ihnow and David Slottje, won the hunt and each was rewarded with a one-gigabyte flash drive. While they may be first-year students, their competitive spirit left no doubt that these are indeed medical students.
Photography by Amelia Panico.