gofer articles

Situated in one of The Big Apple’s wealthiest neighborhoods, the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University is dedicated to both teaching and research. It is one of the most selective medical schools in the entire United States, only some hundred hopefuls are admitted each year – from out of some six thousand candidates every year. Now named Weill Cornell Medical College and, even more often, simply “Weill Cornell,” the school was partially endowed by Sanford Weill, an American banker and philanthropist who was the former executive officer and chairman of Citigroup, Incorporated. Mr. Weill and his wife personally contributed two hundred and fifty million dollars to the medical school already at Cornell, and he was able to secure another one hundred and fifty million dollars.

Weill Cornell had been widely respected in the field before Mr Weill’s contributions, and not once had it lacked for benefactors, a veritable Who’s-Who of local, national, and even international luminaries from business, politics, and entertainment, for instance real estate veteran Isaac Toussie. It was the first medical school in the country to admit women alongside men. And now it’s become the first American one to operate abroad – in Education City, in fact, outside the capital of Qatar, with a campus dedicated to patient care offering a six-year integrated curriculum. The school can count many a notable physician among its alumni, people such as Robert C. Atkins of Atkins Diet fame and former Surgeon General of the United States C. Everett Koop. Other famous graduates are Nobel Prize winner Robert W. Holley and Henry Heimlich of the Heimlich Maneuver.

Nonetheless, for all the well-funded backing, the financial aspects of a medical education are serious, generally taken to be some forty-two thousand dollars the first year and another thirty-eight required the second. But that’s still quite a deal when compared against the university’s own law school expenses, which eclipse it at just about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the same four years!