Board studying and residency rotations

[VickyPath]

Guys, can you please let me know if your program gives you any accomodations to study for your boards? By that I mean, do they put you in "lighter" rotations, or in "research" rotations or anything like that? (if you are taking your boards in Spring of your 4th year of course)…..
I would like to have an idea of what is the board study policy in other programs.
Thanks!

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[dermpathdude]

Our senior class usually schedules 4-6 months of low-to-zero responsibility electives during their last spring semester and spends most of the day studying.

 

[skramer3786]

yep, same at Duke

 

[VickyPath]

Thanks guys

 

[Johnny Sunshine]

My program doesn't allow seniors to "coast" entirely. But they do tend to schedule spring seniors on CP rotations with low clinical responsibility, or which the resident has taken before. From what I've seen, seniors studying for boards tend to spend 3-4 hours a day on duties (rotation, call, tumor boards, random autopsies) then the rest of the day studying. Quite nice.

 

[Euchromatin]

Our program tends to be more weighted toward CP rotations during 4th year to begin with and our PD is pretty accommodating to most schedule requests. I was able to arrange my schedule so that I had all of my calls, presentations/journal clubs/etc., and more service-heavy rotations done in the first half of the year.

 

[Alteran]

Our senior class usually schedules 4-6 months of low-to-zero responsibility electives during their last spring semester and spends most of the day studying.

That's pretty much how it was at my program too.

 

[yaah]

That's part of the reason people think they need to do more fellowships - they are blowing off (in a sense) their elective time to use for boards studying instead of getting practical experience. Obviously it's important to study for boards but there is a way to do it that doesn't require using any possible excuse to study. If you used a couple of those months to do some high-intensity hemepath, for example, you could attain competence in general signout and be useful in private practice.

 

[Johnny Sunshine]

That's part of the reason people think they need to do more fellowships - they are blowing off (in a sense) their elective time to use for boards studying instead of getting practical experience.

True enough. But with poor correlation between most material in the RISE/boards prep books/practice questions, and the actual board exam, anxiety tends to be high and I think many people may over-study out of paranoia.