Hello! Made an account just to answer questions about the Bassett track, having gone through it myself. Let me know if you have any questions about the program. Full disclosure - I'm a member of the 2nd Bassett class and I think they are currently interviewing for the 7th Bassett class at this point, so things may have changed since I went through the program.
Basically, the Bassett track differs from the main PS track with one year - the major clinical year (MCY) or the year of general clerkship electives (i.e. peds, surgery, ob-gyn, etc.) This training is done in upstate NY in Cooperstown, about 4-5 hrs north of NYC. So for your first 1.5 years you will be with the rest of the PS class in NYC, then spend a year in Cooperstown, and then the last 1.5 years you will be doing your Step 1 studying, Scholarly Project, and senior electives just like any other PS student (with the exception that you HAVE to do a certain number of electives at NYPH - maybe 3?)
The Bassett MCY is also very different from the vast majority of clinical years at other medical schools. It's a longitudinal set up such that you don't do your rotations in monthly (mostly inpatient) blocks, but everything throughout the year in mostly outpatient clinics. This means for instance you might be in Ob-Gyn clinic Monday morning and then in the afternoon in Peds clinic. The next day you might be in the OR with surgery.
PROs and CONs (depending on your point of view):
- you are paired with an attending for each specialty for the entire year and have the potential to form very strong relationships with them (for instance, I worked with my Peds attending throughout the year from January to December - none of my attendings invited me for dinner at the houses, but a couple of my classmates definitely were invited by theirs!)
- you can also form longitudinal relationships with patients and follow them to their outpatient appointments or surgeries throughout the year, excusing yourself from your regularly scheduled outpatient clinics to do so (for instance, I was able to follow the same patient from her first prenatal visit at 14 weeks and was also there when she delivered). you could also follow one of your general medicine clinic patients to all of his subspeciality appointments (endo, cardio, ortho, etc.)
- you work one-on-one with an attending - no residents or other medical students to compete with for the most part. bassett only has surgery and medicine residents, but it's very rare that you'll have to work with a medicine resident during an outpatient clinic. from what i remember, you'll still see the surgery residents in outpatient clinic though. but otherwise you'll present directly to your attendings and learn from them directly too.
- because it's pretty much one student, one attending, a lot of stress that comes from worrying about "gunners" just isn't applicable
- you get a lot of experience in the outpatient setting, although at the expense of inpatient experience. for instance, instead of maybe getting around 8 full weeks of inpatient medicine as you would in other programs, you only get 2 full weeks at the beginning and then another week later on. of everything that might have changed, there might be the most changes in how they are balancing this out, so i probably do not have the most up-to-date information on the specifics.
- there is a lot of flexibility - near the end of your year, if you decide you want to go into neuro for instance, you can ask to have more neuro clinics scheduled instead of your other clinics. if you want an additional inpatient week of surgery or medicine, you can also get this scheduled in. everyone is super friendly and in theory, you can ALWAYS show up to do more - if you wanted to deliver a 100 babies by the end of the year, you easily could if you wanted to go in on your own to the L&D floor. similarly, you can always scrub into cases into the OR. in practice, people like taking breaks and you will more likely spend your free time studying or doing other fun, non-medicine things.
- you can schedule your own vacation dates as you choose throughout the year. one bassett student got married in the summer and saved up the vacation days for a two week honeymoon in the summer. other students spread them out to have a lot of 3 and 4 day weekends. for the most part, you always will have your weekends free.
- because so much of your time is spent in outpatient clinics, Bassett has a reputation as being a program for primary care oriented students. in reality, there is no pressure from the program to pursue residency in a primary care field, and out of the two classes of students who have already matched (2014, 2015), i think only two went into family med and one into peds (a decent number into internal med, but as far as i know, not with a primary care focus). otherwise students have matched into urology, anesthesiology, EM, etc. i think this year there are students applying into ENT, dermatology, and general surgery in addition to all of the other fields.
- there is (or at least was!) a $30,000 a year scholarship given to all Bassett students for their four years
- there was no statistical difference in shelf scores between the Bassett track students and the main class - sometimes we did better on average, sometimes we did worse.
- you get to live in a house at rates much cheaper than a NYC apartment
- baseball hall of fame, farmer's markets, maple syrup dispensaries, county fairs, and Game of Thrones licensed beer from the nearby ommegang brewery
- inpatient peds experience was very light - Bassett Hospital doesn't really have a big inpatient peds service, so there just isn't as much opportunity for exposure to that
- even the surgeons are really nice!
The Bassett track is definitely not for everyone. Cooperstown is pretty quiet, although it's great if you love the outdoors. I had a great group of friends up there in my class, but it can also be isolating for others in that you are going to be up there for an entire year with only 9 other classmates. If you love city life, I would definitely advise you against doing this track. I imagine that out of the first two classes, there might be 1-2 people who in retrospect would have wanted to do the main track program instead. For me, I would choose this track again in a heartbeat. I had heard how dehumanizing and depressing the clinical year can be for medical students everywhere, but my year in Cooperstown really was great and I think I would have been much much more stressed had I been at the main campus.
Hope this is helpful!
