Course Registration for Third Year and Clerkships

[Astarael]

Hey all. We just had our registration for third year clerkships today, and a lot of people were unhappy with the way it went. So I want to ask, how does your school do registration for third year? What do you like/dislike about it?

I'm hoping to get some ideas that I might be able to take to our administration to make this a better process for next year.

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[D elegans]

We get to make 1 request, to either have or not have a rotation in a particular block, and it's almost guaranteed that you will have your request honored.

It seems to work ok.

 

[metalgirl14]

Lottery system. We rank 16 cohorts in order of preference. Most people get one of their top 4 choices. If you don't like your cohort, you basically pray that someone else will switch with you. We use the same system for hospitals/locations.

The system works fine for the most part, but several students in my class are quite unhappy with their schedules. Also, this system doesn't take into account personal circumstances (kids, not having a car, etc) when determining location. Needless to say, the scheduling process has been quite a mess.

 

[docnotsopc]

Lottery. We have 4 blocks (each block was 3 set rotations ie ABC) to make a track (your 3rd year), and the order is pretty much same sequence but at different times. There is an even amount of each track option. Basically there is 4 options. You rank and hope you get one of your top choices
For example

Track 1: ABC DEF GHI JKL
Track 2: JKL ABC DEF GHI
Track 3: GHI JKL ABC DEF
Track 4: DEF GHI JKL ABC

We aren't allowed to switch say A and K. It kind of sucks.... a lot. Some people start with their one month vacation so dont get a month off to study for step 2 later on, while others do

 

[theshellyb]

First, earlier in the year we fill out an extenuating circumstances form if it applies. I have kids, a mom who is sick in the area, don't have a car, whatever.

Then we first fill out a form that is basically location preferences (You rank - of these 4 spots where surgery is offered, what is your #1 choice, #2, etc). It also gives us the chance to state which rotation location is the most important to us (I REALLY want to have surgery at this hospital in such-and-such major city)

We get the order of the rotations totally randomly with the lottery. There's a fair amount of switching that goes on. There's no real way to switch individual blocks that we could figure out (it was possible in theory but not in practice due to differing lengths of different rotations) but there was a decent amount of entire schedule switching. (Again, this was just for the *order* of rotations).

Then they let us sit on that for a while, people switched orders until they were generally happy, and then we found out our locations. Then they opened it up to location switching. There has been a lot less of that going on, as far as I can tell (there are a lot of people who want to switch to near school and not many who want to switch to be farther away, so not a whole lot of matching up).

Works pretty well. Might be kindof unncessarily complicated though (God bless those schedulers).

 

[mvenus929]

My class did lottery. All rotations were done in the same order, so it was just a matter of which you started with. So, the first thing we did was pick which track we wanted to be on. There were something like 30 tracks, because there was subtle differences among the blocks (OB and Family were in a block, but you could do OB or Family first in that block, etc).

Once you were assigned your track, you had options for away rotations. We are required to do 3ish blocks away, and each of the aways has a different reputation. So, if you were interested in Peds, you'd be more likely to put Y location, while if you were interested in Surgery, you might rank X location more highly.

After that, we picked which surgical subspecialties we were going to do. Then they went in and balanced everyone out so that we all had the same amount of away time.

Most people were satisfied with how things turned out, though there were a few people who got virtually their last pick on everything.


The class behind us got an overhaul in the way clerkships were broken up, so they did theirs a bit differently. We're broken up into 4 groups for student affairs purposes, so they just took those 4 blocks to make the tracks-- one group starts with OB/Peds, one with Surgery, one with IM, and one with Family/Neuro/Psych. They were then allowed to choose away rotations and surgical subspecialties similar to how we did.

They haven't complained as much, but their class has a different mentality than we did overall. A lot of people don't like it, but there's not much choice in the matter for them.

 

[Kaustikos]

We have about 20 different tracks to choose from. We rank them based on what we'd prefer to do first. The basics are Block A) Fam/Peds/Vac, B)IM/Neuro/etc C)OBGYN/Surg/SURSS

But those three can occur in any variation (ABC/BCA/BAC/ETC) and those individual blocks can also occur in different variations... (A - Fam/Peds/Vac, Peds/Fam/Vac, Vac/Fam/Peds)

So, you rank them on what you "want". I wanted IM, then Surgery and then Fam/Peds... I wanted to keep my step 1 knowledge in my head/retained so I knew that IM would help. I ranked everyone that had IM first and Fam/Peds last. I got the exact opposite.

Is it a lottery? I think so. I don't think ranking matters here because I have classmates who wanted fam/peds first and im last who got the exact opposite when they ranked. Not exactly awesome when you're trying to setup your vacation to do a rotation that requires prior rotation in IM or Surgery.

AFTER all that - you figure out
a) Where you want to do Family Medicine
b) Types of Peds you want to do
c) Types of Surgical subspecialties you want to do

The drawback? No surgical onc for me. And I wanted to use my vacation month to DO that. Or even rad/onc. But no one will want a third year who's only experience is family med/peds.... And surg onc during vacation is impossible with my schedule since my vacation is before my surgical rotation.


TLDR - mine sucks too, Ast.

 

[NickNaylor]

Lottery system. We rank 16 cohorts in order of preference. Most people get one of their top 4 choices. If you don't like your cohort, you basically pray that someone else will switch with you. We use the same system for hospitals/locations.

The system works fine for the most part, but several students in my class are quite unhappy with their schedules. Also, this system doesn't take into account personal circumstances (kids, not having a car, etc) when determining location. Needless to say, the scheduling process has been quite a mess.

We use a similar system, except we have somewhere north of 20 tracks to choose from. I didn't really care about the order of the rotations, though I'm a little miffed at not being able to do an elective as the rotations we can substitute with month-long electives is the first block of the year and MS4s get priority.

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