Asking for a SLOR, after how many hours spent with an attending?

[LFSdriver]

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I will be doing my elective in EM at an away hospital and plan to apply for EM in the match. My shorter elective is only 3 weeks.

How many hours should I have spent with an attending before asking for a SLOR? I'm unsure how they will choose to organize my schedule, who I will assigned with or if it will be more open ended.

I am just slightly confused in the above matter since it will be less team based than my medicine/surgery rotations. I suppose I might be dwelling on this too far in advance.

 

[julie29524]

At my home institution, we were told to have at least 2 shifts (8 or 12 hrs) with an attending b4 asking for a SLOR. You'll either be assigned to an attending for that shift or to an upper level resident, but who you get assigned to is pretty random unless you talk to the coordinator before she makes the schedule and ask for certain attendings/resident. When we got our schedule, almost everyone had to change things around to get those shifts in order. So your schedule might be screwy, but I think the coordinator and clerkship director will help you because I'm sure this is an issue every year. My advice is to not stress about it and ask how past MS4s at your place did it before.

Good Luck

I will be doing my elective in EM at an away hospital and plan to apply for EM in the match. My shorter elective is only 3 weeks.

How many hours should I have spent with an attending before asking for a SLOR? I'm unsure how they will choose to organize my schedule, who I will assigned with or if it will be more open ended.

I am just slightly confused in the above matter since it will be less team based than my medicine/surgery rotations. I suppose I might be dwelling on this too far in advance.

 

[gro2001]

I will be doing my elective in EM at an away hospital and plan to apply for EM in the match. My shorter elective is only 3 weeks.

How many hours should I have spent with an attending before asking for a SLOR? I'm unsure how they will choose to organize my schedule, who I will assigned with or if it will be more open ended.

I am just slightly confused in the above matter since it will be less team based than my medicine/surgery rotations. I suppose I might be dwelling on this too far in advance.

I would wait until the end of the shift (so 8-12 hours). Ideally you would have at least a couple of shifts with an attending, allowing you to build a little more rapport before having to ask them for a letter. Unfortunately in some rotations you only have each attending for just 1 shift. If that's the case, you could wait till the third week of the rotation before asking them, so that you can refer them to the attendings you have worked with (keep a list of names and dates).

 

[EctopicFetus]

I would ask for a copy of your schedule as well as the attendings schedule to try to figure out who you will be working with. In the middle of that 1st shift I would just say something to the attending like Oh I see we have 3 shifts together, that should be fun.

That attending will likely know you are about to hit them up for a SLOR if things go well.

 

[LFSdriver]

Thanks so much everyone.

 

[Tiger10]

I will be doing my elective in EM at an away hospital and plan to apply for EM in the match. My shorter elective is only 3 weeks.

How many hours should I have spent with an attending before asking for a SLOR? I'm unsure how they will choose to organize my schedule, who I will assigned with or if it will be more open ended.

I am just slightly confused in the above matter since it will be less team based than my medicine/surgery rotations. I suppose I might be dwelling on this too far in advance.

All 3 of my EM rotations were set up so that we had evaluation cards that were given to attendings/residents at the end of each shift. At the end of the month, whoever was in charge of student evaluations would use them to do the evaluation as well as write a SLOR based on the cumulative feedback. Ideally, you would also work a couple of shifts with whichever attending is responsible for that - usually either the clerkship director or program director.