Some SGU affiliated hospitals have 3-4 core rotations (internal med/peds/ob/surgery), while some only have 1 or 2. At the last semester in St Vincent, you are given a wish list to list top 3 hospitals (you are also given a clinical rotations handbook which describes each rotation and each hospital in brief.
I got my 1st choice: St Michael's in Newark NJ...for Internal Med, Surgery, OB and Peds, pretty sweet, huh? Not really. With one week before I finished my Intro to Medicine rotation (which I did not receive credit for because it was subsequently removed from the SGU curriculum, so my 4 weeks of work was down the drains), SGU told me and 12 of my class mates at St Mike's that we cannot continue there because St Mike's peds dept is no longer open to SGU students (probably on the urging of UMDNJ/Newark's School of medicine). So we had three choices as explained to us by the assoc dean of clinical studies:
1. Go to upstate NY and do surgery at a smaller hospital (No, they didn't care about housing or the fact that we signed leases for one year in New Jersey).
2. Go to the UK.
3. Take a leave of absence from SGU.
They said that we must choose one of these three options (all 12 went upstate), but that after the surgery rotation, we get a free ticket that will give us ABSOLUTE priority to any rotation...we can cut anybody in line at any SGU affiliated hospital. My buddy tried to use this ticket for his peds rotation, and yep, you guessed it, they denied him. SGU promised us absolute priority, but that means next to nothing. Spin doctors.
After you've begun your rotations, it's up to you to contact SGU with your scheduling for future rotations. You do this by applying to a hospital and then getting approval from SGU (or something like that). You get free run of the system if you're determined, motivated and know how to finess a secretary over the phone and fax. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of the SGU office who will dump you into the crummiest hospitals with a vacant slot.
As far as housing goes, most hospitals have apts that are pretty run down. You can either crash there or you can find your own apt. I found my own.