Pilar Burillo Simões, 6th grade student, although still not 100% sure of what will follow, leans more to a surgery.

Medicine Night (NdM) is the oldest academic show in Portugal. There's no FMUL student that doesn't know this phrase by heart. It's the first one we say when people ask us what it is. It's the first one we hear when we ask the same question, wearing our yellow sweaters and six years away from carrying the weight on our own shoulders, of accomplishing such a Herculean task.

But what's NdM anyway? Now that I think about it, Herculean task is not exactly an exaggerated definition. Because that's what it's all about. Year after year, on the day after the evening we book in our agenda months in advance, the fifth year inherits the task of organizing the best NdM ever. That's the underlying principle. The dream. The motto. Always more and always better, which in our case study has some interesting consequences.

The most obvious one was going from a revue show presented at the Politeama Theatre in 1929 to a mega-production for an audience of 3000 people that involves, among other things, renting Campo Pequeno for 3 days and the so-called "Cantina II" (a.k.a, headquarters) for a few months. In the meantime, we managed to survive the Estado Novo regime and preserve the spirit that, despite all the parties, get-togethers, and opportunities we are offered throughout the course, still leads us to call this "the best Night of the Year".

It's not difficult to understand why. Any member of the public, even those from outside the FML (which are more and more, mainly colleagues from other faculties who hear about the show), quickly understand what it's all about. Over the course of 3 hours, the finalists introduce the newly-arrived freshmen to a faculty they are only just starting to get to know. And we go a good deal further than official speeches on Introduction Week. With an honesty that is only allowed among colleagues, and with the critical sense and authority that only the love of the game gives us, we build a narrative that sums up our experience and our identity as a group, underpinned by 6 years that were as good as they were bad, complemented by the contributions of each year, from the 2nd to the 5th, which explore, in greater detail, the realities they experienced in the previous year.

We pass on our love for this institution, so often flawed but that made us so happy over the course of six years, to those who are only just taking their first steps in this new world. We pass on the values ingrained in its students. Proactivity and non-conformity, among others. In the pursuit of this main goal, NdM takes on a satirical and interventionist stance by publicly denouncing educational gaps, bureaucracy, the degradation of the National Health Service and the medical career, and also the barrier that still exists between institutional communication and students, hoping that the decision-makers, professors, and members of the faculty's administration take our concerns into account. Considering that we were contacted by the FMUL Newsletter to write this article, following a sketch we wrote about it, I feel tempted to believe that someone else might have heard us.

Ironically, making this dream come true entails nightmarish logistics. A huge octopus whose tentacles reach out to production companies, choreographers, sponsors from all possible business areas, from catering to medical material. They reach out to all the other academic years, whose own representative committees coordinate their vision for the ten minutes they are given (and coordinate all the participants from their year), with the underlying theme of the show. And they reach out to the almost 400 6th-year students who take part in this show, by acting, dancing or playing music.

An octopus whose head are the members of the Organising Committee of the Medicine Night, elected in the General Year Meeting (RGAno), held in March. Thirty-seven people among General Coordination, Treasury, Artistic Direction, Image, Logistics, Sponsorship, Set Design, and Dance. All of them, all 400 of us, students, trainees, applicants to Master's Degree (a nice way of saying that half of us are still dealing with our thesis), and to specialised training (another beautiful expression, this time to explain that, in addition to all this, we still have to study for the National Seriation Exam), sometimes workers, sometimes athletes, always members of a family and of a circle of friends that are too often exchanged for any of the above.

But, as all the above, NdM is not an option. It's an experience we have to go through to become physicians at the FML, as mandatory as any academic subject. It's the permanent and almost ritual mark that stays in our minds and distinguishes the physicians who were trained here and will forever keep, deep in their hearts, the memory that allowed giving birth to the best of them all. As I said in the beginning, striving to improve year after year is a project with consequences. My favourite one is that the best NdM is always the one we organise, because it's the last we will experience, at least as students. And of course, always, no doubt, the one that is still to come. Good luck, 14-20.

Pilar Burillo Simões

NdM Organization Committee

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Image credits: photo mumentus