Doing clinical rotations before starting in the lab

From ScribbleWiki: MD PhD Advice

Most Yale MD/PhD students do some clinical rotations before starting in the lab, to get their feet wet and also to prepare them for Wednesday Evening Clinics. Before picking your schedule, take the following into consideration.

• Would you want to participate in Wednesday Evening clinic? If so, put your name on the list *early*, as positions are quickly filled with medical students doing their fifth year. Also, make sure you have all the requirements: ambulatory medicine, neurology, psychiatry, at least outpatient ob/gyn, and inpatient medicine. Outpatient pediatrics is recommended as well.

• If you do not want to participate in the Wednesday Evening clinics, it is probably best to do your inpatient medicine rotation after your lab time. This is because almost all residencies (except surgery and pathology) require a medicine sub-I, and a sub-I is much easier if you haven't had 4 years to forget everything about transudative exudates and antiarrhythmic drugs.

• If you have completed inpatient medicine already, are obliged to do a medicine sub-I after your lab time, and your performance on the sub-I is crucial to your residency application (e.g. you are applying in medicine), consider doing a refresher month under Dr. Cyrus Kapadia or Fred Gorelick at the VA. As with the refresher under Dr. Wu at St. Raphael's, this refresher does not need to be reported to the Office of Education, and you will not be assigned a grade.

• If you already know (before you start in lab) that you want to go into a surgery or a surgical subspecialty, especially a highly competitive one (Plastics surgery, Orthopedics, Neurosurgery), complete this rotation *before* starting your lab work, and make a point of establishing a mentor with whom you can meet and operate over the lab years. Surgical knowledge and skills dwindle severely with time - much more so than knowledge of antiarrhythmics - and having a PhD will not necessarily make you more coveted for a surgical residency position if you do not have an established mentor and are unskilled in the OR.

• All sub-internships are best left until after the laboratory years. Sub-I's in the first 4 months of the medical/academic year need to be formally scheduled via the lottery for Medicine, Pediatrics, or Ob-Gyn. Everyone in these fields is trying to do one before heading out to interviews for the match. Sub-I's at the end of the 3rd or 4th clinical years can be scheduled much more freely, directly with the department office.

• As a third year medical student, there is no one easy rotation to start out with. Many students spend hours worrying about the best possible schedule (e.g. start with psychiatry or with medicine?), but in the end, each one has it's pros and cons, and is not worth the anxiety.