Third Year Rotations

A new, fun, and daunting task looming over us right now is figuring out our third year rotations. The third year is modularized in a pretty convenient fashion. There are six blocks, eight weeks each. The required rotations are divided into 8-, 6-, and 2-week segments that can be sort of interchanged. These include internal medicine (8), surgery (8), neurology/psychiatry (8), obstetrics/gynecology (6), pediatrics (6), family and community medicine (6), anesthesia (2), and surgical subspecialties (2). Each of the rotations is offered at a panoply of sites, from university academic hospitals to community practices to rural settings (as far as Fresno). I'm pretty excited about it. It's interesting how they decide which rotations to require; we're one of the few schools that require anesthesia, but when I heard a talk from the anesthesia clerkship director, he said that the focus is on learning skills such as IV placement, monitoring a patient, and securing an airway that are useful in any field rather than on convincing people to go into anesthesia. We also have to do two weeks in a surgical sub like opthalmology, urology, head and neck, neuro, or ortho, and that's pretty cool. It's interesting to see how other medical schools differ (Stanford requires critical care; Harvard, I think, does a month in radiology). In any case, people lately are in a flurry trying to figure out how to order their clerkships and where to do them.