Yale – UCL Poetry

Yale – UCL Poetry Competitions

The Inspiration

The idea for a poetry competition was born out of the Yale-UCL Collaborative, which fosters partnerships in the biomedical sciences and engineering and has influenced the study of social sciences, humanities, law and architecture as well as facilitating student and staff exchanges. The idea originated by chance in 2011 when two Yale affiliates sat next to each other at the Yale – Harvard football game. Mark Singer, a writer for The New Yorker and John Martin, a cardiovascular medicine professor at Yale School of Medicine, were both watching the football match. During intermission they discussed how medicine on both sides of the Atlantic is becoming a factory system and that they should create a platform that allows medical students a chance to reflect and explore insights from their experiences.

The poetry competition was born.

The Launch

The poetry competition was launched in February 2011 by Professor John Martin, UCL Professor in Cardiovascular Medicine and co-director of the Yale UCL Collaborative and is run by the students yearly.

The competition was born in the hope of inspiring, nurturing and promoting the humanities within medical education and to help provide an outlet for students.

The Journey

The poetry competition was launched in 2011 for medical students and then from 2012 engineering students are also invited to submit poems.

For the last 10 years, it has been a well-received creative outlet for medical and engineering students to help them work through some of the complex emotions that come up during their student life.

One student commented:

“In many ways, I have experienced clinical medicine as a series of losses: loss of fear, loss of naivety, and loss of self-doubt. But also the erosion of empathy, erosion of idealism, and erosion of identity. I am truly grateful for this opportunity to express a moment that moved me, that I didn’t want to lose to hard-heartedness.”

In 2021, the event was held virtually for the first time. The judging panel comprised of a poet, playwright and journalist Clare Pollard and a poet, paediatrician and writer Dr Irène P. Mathieu. Current sponsors, Vinni and Mintoo Bhandari awarded 4 prizes in total. The first prize winner (overall) and the first prize winner in the open category were awarded £1000 ($1370) each. Both the runners up were awarded £500 ($685) each.

This year’s Yale-UCL university poetry competition provided a powerful platform for students of medicine and other disciplines to share their reflections on Covid-19.