Can you find fault with doing electives before cores?

[Albert Sabin]

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Anyone care to discuss any potential residency (or other) issues related to doing elective rotations prior to completing cores? BTW, whereas in most US schools this is not possible, it is for Carib students rotating in US hospitals. Thanks in advance.

 

[mlw03]

depends on the elective - for something like rad, anesthesia, and path i doubt it would matter too much. but for any advanced medicine, pediatric, surgical, or subspecialty elective the problem i see is that you won't have the knowledge foundation necessary to even keep up during rounds.

for example, you decide to do a cardiology elective before doing internal medicine. well, at my school during IM we cover ACS management, chest pain workup, EKG basics, hypertension management, etc. These are basic things to a cardiologist and your elective will be spent catching up with what you should know from general medicine instead of focusing on the higher level issues that a subspecialist focuses their time and energy on. i think the reason the traditional med school curiculum includes these core rotations is because they are essential to anyone practicing medicine, and essential to the education of a doctor.

from a residency issue i can't see how it would matter, other than the risk of poor performance for the reasons stated above.

 

[BADMD]

Anyone care to discuss any potential residency (or other) issues related to doing elective rotations prior to completing cores? BTW, whereas in most US schools this is not possible, it is for Carib students rotating in US hospitals. Thanks in advance.

If you do electives before the core rotations, you will likely do worse than your peers. Anesthesia is more than intubation, path is more than looking at slides, and rads is more than looking at pictures.

Basic understanding of the diseases, processes and management are crucial for all these fields. Unless there is an overwelming reason to change your order, do the core rotations, especially medicine and surgery.

 

[Wednesday]

You might be wrong about what you want to do and end up loving Ob/Gyn (or something you take last because you "know" you'll hate it) and have already matched into something else. Oops.

I would also say taking an elective like emergency medicine would be better after you've taken the cores because it incorporates just about everything and you just won't do as well or get as much out of it.

But there are other schools that allow this (Hopkins comes to mind.) If you're going to do it, be smart about it and don't wait to take ALL your cores until 4th year. That would be sort of silly.

 

[NotAProgDirector]

Delaying your cores will also delay your scores being reported. You want to make sure that your core scores -- Medicine, Surgery, and whatever field you are interested in are reported before residency application time.

 

[XoQo]

there was some talk at my school of adding an elective block during the third year (1 month) where you could take an elective instead of a core -- with the missed core deferred to the 4th year