Sunday, December 10, 2006

More peds

This week has been fairly busy—nothing particularly exciting has occurred. I was on call Friday so had to go back in yesterday. I feel really bad for my intern—she had seven admissions and was basically running around all night long. Fortunately I was able to help her at least a little by talking to the radiologists, calling medical records, etc., but there is only so much one is able to do as a student—for some reason on this rotation interns have to write notes even on patients that students write notes on, as opposed to the typical “agree with above” addendum on most other rotations, so my seeing patients didn’t particularly help her any. Today is my last day off before Christmas break—I am becoming more and more glad that I did CT surgery, because now there is pretty much no schedule that I am intimidated by. Even though I have been working 60-70 hours a week this month, I am the most relaxed I have been in two and a half years. I think part of it is that since one doesn’t have to go to the OR, there is a lot more time to get floor work done thus one does not feel quite as pressed for time.

Wednesday we had a class meeting to talk a little about getting ready for fourth year, we’ll have another in February to actually schedule it. However, we have to pick an advisor in the beginning of January to help us make plans. One of the trauma surgeons spoke about things to do/not to do in fourth year for students interested in surgery. She recommended taking as few surgery rotations and as many medicine rotations as possible. Essentially she said the primary goal of surgery rotations should be to get letters of recommendation from the biggest names possible, while the primary goal of the medicine rotations should be to learn (likewise the medicine doctor who spoke said that students interested in medicine should do as few medicine and as many surgery rotations as possible), the idea being that surgery residents have their entire lives to learn about surgery, but not much time to learn about medicine. One of the things she was adamant about was that one should never do an away rotation at a place one is interested in doing a residency (again, the opposite of what the medicine doctor recommended). Apparently, only one visiting student to my school has been accepted to our program in the last seven years (my intern from CT surgery). I think that I am going to ask her to be my advisor—from what I hear she is super intense, but does take time to teach students. I think she would make things happen and would be able to help me figure out where to apply/what rotations to take that I could get good letters from. The only mildly scary thing is that picking an advisor, while not completely commiting one to going into a certain specialty, is certainly a big step in that direction. I’m pretty sure I want to do surgery, but I do like to have room to change my mind.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I heard the same advice about not doing away rotations. I know a lot of students use them to make sure of getting an interview at the program, and it does work for that; but the reasoning I heard was, it also guarantees that they'll find out all your weaknesses very well. If your grades and scores are good enough you can get interviews just based on that.

As for advisers, it is possible to switch away from the adviser's specialty; painful, but possible. :) You just have to link up with a mentor in the field you do pick who's willing to give you advice about it, without the title.

6:18 AM  

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