I find this post peculiar considering at this time during your first year you have had zero exposure to the Scholl clinic. How can you make such definitive statements? To the OP, first year students don't step foot inside the clinic until the Summer quarter at the end of their first year.
As a 2nd year student who is in the middle of their clinic training I can say that yes the clinic is usually not busy at all.
In total their might be 30-40 patients coming in each clinic day but what we do here is divide the day into two sessions. A morning session and an afternoon session. About 10 P2s and P3s are in the morning session and then 10 new P2 and P3 students come in during the afternoon hours to handle afternoon/evening patients. So yeah a decent amount of patients come to the clinic but with the amount of students in there I get to see about 1-2 patients on most clinic days. Which is obviously not a lot.
There are pros and cons to this. But personally I feel the pros far outweigh the cons. Definite cons are lack of patient exposure and chances to see a wide variety of different pathologies. That's obvious...
Being that the Scholl clinic is a teaching clinic you spend a lot of your time learning the ropes. The students job is to work up the patient (vitals, chief complaint, history, physical exam, etc) and then we present to the attending. This gives the student every opportunity to apply what he/she has learned in the student workshops. When presenting to the attending it's pretty certain you will be asked questions or "pimped" by the attending. The attendings are not out to get you, they do it because they are trying to TEACH you how to do things the right way and to start thinking like a clinician. For me personally it has been a very positive experience. If we were in a very busy clinic I think I would be too overwhelmed because I'm still trying to figure things out and plus I am only a second year student...still really don't know much yet.
There are going to be some changes in the near future though. Mt Sinai hospital is going to allow second year students to start coming to their clinic and shadow the attendings starting next year. They are doing this so students get an increased exposure to different pathologies. SCPM and Sinai are pretty tight and lot of their attendings teach the clinical courses here at Scholl.