...2. are you bothered by the fact that we need to coordinate our own 3rd and 4th year rotations..? (Wouldn't that be stressful having to student for step 1 and dealing with these during 2nd year?)
3. Being as established as LECOM, just wondering why they still don't have rotation sites set up for the students...
...
To clarify some of these:
2. Understanding how this works was confusing for me as well, as I saw conflicting info online and posted by others. Now I actually see how it works:
The student body is responsible for setting up their rotations. What this means is that the student body president and VP of your class in SH will work with the student body president and VP of the same year class in Erie, and they will divide up rotations (or an algorithm will do it for them) based on a student survey that everyone (at Erie & SH) fills out. LECOM has a set of core rotations for all of its students. It is up to you to fill out a survey, in which you can rank
13's (clinical sites where you can do ALL of your core rotations),
regions (city/state region in which you want to the majority of your rotations), OR
schedule (when you want your vacation/electives to be in the year).
You are NOT calling up hospitals and setting up rotations yourself EXCEPT for electives/selectives (which everyone I know in other medical schools has to do anyways - using VSAS makes it easier too).
Now, ideally the algorithm works to give you your highest rank, but obviously some people will get their 1st choice whereas others may get 3rd or 4th, etc based purely on demand of where they ranked.
Now if you pick a 13, and there's enough room, you get placed in a specific schedule, and pretty much don't have to worry about anything. If you pick a region/schedule, you are placed in groups based on your rotation schedule (I think) and in your group, you divvy up rotations. Your group meets a few times in first semester second year for I think a total of ~10 hrs (so not really a huge time commitment).
That part is a bit hazy for me still, because I'm still a first year, and I haven't experienced it yet. That said, the only real time you are devoting to scheduling clinicals as a LECOM student is if you are class President/VP or if you choose to be your group's representative (each group has a representative that goes to meetings with the other representatives to bring up whatever their group wants to do).
Obviously you have to set up electives/selectives, but you can opt to have the clin ed department set them up for you, which is not ideal for you because they'll put you wherever they have empty spots that others don't want.
3. See above. They apparently implemented this method to give students more of a say in where they end up. They could easily just divide students wherever (apparently they've done this before), but that's not really in our best interest.
Appendix: Alpha Group - Alpha group is the group of students that have <2.5 GPA in medical school by the end of first year. If you fall into this group, you are required to do your 3rd year core rotations at one of 2 locations: Millcreek in Erie OR Arnot Ogden in Elmira, NY. These sites have a big LECOM presence, and if you are at risk (<2.5 GPA) you are placed here and your progress is monitored/supplemented. (Not really sure how this works.) They are both 13's with contracts with LECOM to take a chunk of students, so you will be able to do all your core rotations there and will be with a good amount of your classmates.
Also, if a MS2 wants to chime in and explain better how this works and correct anything I may have gotten wrong, that would be great!
