Hey Doctor101,
I completely understand your anxiety but I have to agree with BigRed. Everything is school dependant and much of the time it is even rotation dependant. I remember last year (MSII year) being confused at the vague description the 3rd years would give me of the experience (ie. you have clinic, you're on the floor, what the hell does that actually mean!?) The other problem is that variation happens a lot of the time within the clerkship depending on what your assigned. I can give you a general outline of what my surgery experience was like though since I can remember it the most clearly. This is going to be long since I will cover many basic terms so bear with me:
5:15-6:30AM (or whenver you see your resident) - See the patient in the morning that you operated on the day before, these are your "assigned patients" You write a note in the chart about what the complaints are and what you want to do, your basic SOAP note format. Most hospitals have floors that a service will dominate, for example surgery is the second floor here, so when I was on the floor, it usually meant seeing patients on the second floor.
7:00 - Rounded on patients on most services. This means you go from patient room to room as a team, you will brieftly present your patient when you come to them (she had this, no problems last night, blah blah blah), and then our chiefs read our notes with our plans and corrected us accordingly, sometimes more then others
Nice helpful residence would kindly add to your presentation so that the chiefs had no questions by the end.
Thursdays @7 - Morbidity and Mortality and Grand rounds: M&M is where patient complications are discussed to all the residents and attendings, presented by the resident in charge of that patient. Grand Rounds is usually a lecture by a faculty member to the whole surgery dept. on a topic. These have breakfast usually (!!) and you get to see some interesting discussions
1-2 times/week clinic: Depends on when your service (trauma, general, ortho, CT, etc.) has clinic. These are usually 15-20 minute visits where you see patients who are preparing to have surgery, or have recently had surgery. Just making sure they are ok for post-op visits. pre-op is usually a bit more extensive.
3-4 times/ week, afternoon "Cores" - These are pseudolectures for the medstudents that SUCK (high pressure). I don't know if other schools have things like these but they atleast probably have lectures. Ours were "student led discussions" where we have a case booklet, we were suppose to prepare for for multiple cases for the topic of the day, and they proceded to go around the room and drill us, then grade us on our responses. This was attending dependant, some went around the room while others just lectured and didn't do the cases all together.
Random time: We were paired with a mentor where ~6 of us would all meet up and talk with an attending about random topics, this was suppose to be your go to person if you had any problems, they were usually all very student friendly.
All the times inbetween the students would decide amongst themselves who was going to cover what surgery cases for the day. when you weren't in surgery you were either waiting for surgery to begin and studying, or helping out your favorite resident on the floor manage patients.
At my school, we are assigned (after request) to 4 different subspecialty services (again, CT, ortho, vascular, etc) for 1 week. It was required that we rotate atleast 1 week on trauma, and 2 weeks on general. Our total clerkship time is 10 weeks.
Allright sorry for the book but hopefully that gives you an idea of what 1 students experience is like. In total I was usually at the hospital from 5:00,5:30 - 5 or 6. Longer while I was on CT, shorter on some other services.
Again highly school and clerkship dependant. if 10 people posted something like this, it would probably be drastically different. Making 3rd year more uniform is where I believe most schools could improve but thats another topic entirely. Hope it helps!
