AST L P A G E Full Circle I n September 1970, my wife, Judy, and I arrived in Piscataway, excited to be embarking on new careers. She went to the Lindeneau Elementary School in Edison as a teacher of sixth graders, and I went to the brand-new medical sciences building on the Rutgers Medical School (RMS) campus as a member of its first full class of 80 students. The RMS faculty and staff could not do enough for their new charges and were somehow even more excited than the students. And there were so many of them! We students were easily outnumbered by faculty members, and everyone did all that was possible to make us feel COURTESY OF MARK A. BLOOMBERG, MD ’74, MBA the new College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (CMDNJ). We didn’t care— our education continued unabated, and our school was still referred to as Rutgers Medical School. A fortunate 32 of us were able to stay in Piscataway as the first students to fulfill clinical rotations at RMS. As the rest of our classmates dispersed across the country, welcome. They carefully taught, guided, and counseled us in the many amazing new disciplines, and we all knew just how special the experiences were for all of us. As the first full-sized class, we thoroughly enjoyed the new lecture halls, anatomy labs, and auditorium, even as we continued the tradition of working in our new sixteen-person multipurpose classrooms, faithfully copied from the original ones used by the four earlier, sixteen-student RMS cohorts that had been housed in the temporary buildings located just behind the new Research Tower and Teaching Laboratories. Even as we attended our classes, changes were afoot. During our first year, the medical school was separated from Rutgers University and incorporated under the umbrella of transferring to other medical schools for their clinical years, we began our rotations at the Middlesex, St. Peter’s, Muhlenberg, and Raritan Valley hospitals as well as Hunterdon Medical Center. Finally, in June 1974, we enjoyed a wonderful graduation ceremony held at the new Garden State Arts Center, located off the Garden State Parkway in Holmdel. —Continued on page 63 B Y M A R K A. B L O O M B E R G, M D, C L A S S O F 1 9 7 4 64 Robert Wood Johnson I MEDICINE