Burnett School of Medicine at TCU Celebrates One-Year Anniversary at Arnold Hall

FORT WORTH  – You could hear music and laughter coming out of Arnold Hall at Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University as you walked up West Rosedale Street in Fort Worth’s Near Southside neighborhood. 

“I’ve been in clinic so much recently so it was great to be able to come back and touch base with home,” said Nicolas Martinez, MS2 at Burnett School of Medicine at TCU. 

Burnett School of Medicine students, faculty, and staff celebrated the one-year anniversary of Arnold Hall in late June. The celebration was also a good way for Martinez and other students to reconnect with faculty and staff at the medical school. 

“It’s awesome because it reminds us that there are really people here for us,” Martinez said.  

The celebration also served as the students, faculty and staff first chance to view the newly installed Journey sculpture anchoring the greenspace lawn at Arnold Hall. The sculpture symbolically celebrates life-long learning as a pathway and portal. It inspires reflection on the educational journey of a future physician and their patient.  The sculpture serves as a testament to “patients as individuals” being the center of the educational experience, and that each engagement is always with a person, not the disease.  

The medical school brought in food trucks from Frios gourmet frozen pops and Mexican soul food from Salsa Limon for the celebration. There was also a foosball table, a cornhole game, and Jenga set up outside. Inside the building, there was line dancing and a cake walk where students, faculty, and staff could win homemade cookies, brownies and cakes. 

Iza Zabaneh, MS2 at Burnett School of Medicine, heard about the cake walk all morning in class before the celebration. He walked away from the celebration with a homemade Texas Sheet Cake.  

“There were people more excited than me about the cake walk,” Zabaneh said. “Then of course I just casually walked in and won the cake. I hadn’t tried one before today but I will say it was a 10 out of 10 for sure.” 

Linbeck construction broke ground on the 95,000-square-foot medical education building in Fort Worth’s Medical Innovation District (MID) in August 2022. Construction was completed in June 2024. The building boasts innovative technology and education spaces to train future physicians.  

“I’ve been here when it was just steel beams and now there’s a foundation and there’s this community that’s always here for us,” Martinez said. 

In September 2024, Arnold Hall was named in honor of Ashley and Greg Arnold of Dallas, Texas, for their generous philanthropic support of TCU and the Burnett School of Medicine. The medical education building serves as the hub for 240 medical students along with hundreds of faculty and staff.  

One of Martinez’s favorite spaces in Arnold Hall are the classrooms that line the halls of the first floor. The cutting-edge classrooms are multi-faceted in their use for studying or group-based learning. They all have expansive whiteboards, video conferencing, and internet capabilities.  

“I like to draw things out and make it colorful,” Martinez said. “I can take up as much space as I want too because there’s so much area for everyone to utilize.”