When did you realise that you couldn’t dress like a teenager anymore?

Amusingly enough it was while I was still a teenager.

In medical school, to be precise. On strict instructions from our professors. Some context is in order here.

I grew up and then went to medical school in India. And this is something anyone who did the same (or is doing currently) will unmistakably identify with.

There is no such thing as pre-med, you go to medical school right out of high school at the age of 17. Med school consisted of three academic years, each one being eighteen months long for a total of four and a half years. Followed by a year-long hospital internship. At nearly six years, it is an exhaustive degree.

I had always been a year younger for my class in school and high school anyway, which meant that I started med school at age 16.

The first academic year consisted entirely of pre-clinical subjects (anatomy, physiology and biochemistry) and while we had plenty of dissecting corpses and laboratory specimens, we never saw the inside of any hospital.

But then starting in Year 2 (at age 18 for me), we were initiated into bedside teaching alongside our academic studies. Year 3 would then consist entirely of clinical subjects (internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and so on).

Now the thing is that it does not inspire much confidence in patients to be treated by someone who looks like a kid. With good reason, because we were still teens. It wasn’t exactly Doogie Howser M.D. but pretty close to that.

So our professors strictly instructed us to dress in a fashion that would at least make us look respectable. We needed to do all that we could to look mature beyond our ages!

1. Dress shirts. No T-Shirts.
2. Trousers. No jeans or khakhis.
3. Dress shoes. No keds or sneakers.
4. Clean shaven preferably. No fancy mustaches and definitely no long hipster-style beards (unless you were a Sikh and your religion required you to not cut off your hair).

And our clothes better be neatly pressed and shoes properly polished. Have your hair cut short and neatly. Oh and no tattoos, pony tails or any of that kind of stuff.

I saw classmates being ordered to literally go back home and change if they walked into the ward looking like they came to a coffee shop. One professor said to my buddy

“What the hell do you think is going on in here? Some kind of street fair?!” (In a fashion typical of us guys, I started laughing hard when the prof said it to him).

Dressing down would be okay if you were a 30 year-old, but at 18 or 19, patients think -

“You’re going to let this kid examine me? Really?”

This shit below looks cool and hip in a TV sitcom.

But in real life, patients like to be examined by someone who looks experienced. Not like a kid who’s just walked into the hospital ward after hanging out at the mall. Patients wouldn’t be thrilled about getting their abdomens cut open by little Doogie!

I had a lot of classmates with spectacles, a few with receding hairlines and some whose hair had even begun to gray out a bit. And for once I envied those fellows! Because all of those things made them look older.

Appearance and presentation matter a lot for professionals.

The worst part was that this med school was in a city renowned for its extreme dry heat in the summer. Think of it as you would Phoenix,Arizona except even worse. Temperatures soared regularly beyond 100 degree F (40 Celsius). It was terrible to have to wear a dress shirt, trousers and all that, you felt like you were getting cooked inside.

But that’s the way conservative professions like medicine, banking and the military simply are (in contrast to other high profile sectors like technology).

It’s like how on Wall Street we were expected to wear full suits every day even in the terrible humidity and heat of New York in the months of July and August. One of the handful of investment bankers I can ever recall seeing wearing properly long hair (albeit very neatly kept) was a managing director at Lazard’s investment banking division - but he was high up enough in the food chain to be able to pull that shit off! And I myself grew my facial hair only once I entered the world of corporate finance where the rules are less strict (though you still have to dress well, no T-shirt, jeans and such).

Like how my closest friend who is an army officer once told me that they had to shave everyday in military school. In his words

“If you don’t have a razor, then go find a sharp stone or shard of glass! But you HAD BETTER be clean shaven at the call up on the assembly ground every morning!”

The year after medical school when I was a research post-graduate were the polar opposite. We could dress as we pleased as scientists.

Then it reverted back when I joined the corporate world in the words Pacino says to Depp in the movie Donnie Brasco about getting inducted into the Mafia, when Depp is still wearing his mustache and walking around in jeans and cowboy boots

“Get a pair of pants. This ain't a fucking rodeo!”