Hi all,
Going to be doing an anesthesiology away rotation at Hopkins coming up in a few weeks. Anyone know what I should expect?
I've found that anesthesia AIs and elective rotations vary significantly across institutions - for example at my home institution the anesthesia AI is super chill and essentially you make of it what you want.
Any advice would be helpful. Thanks!
Been a long time but I did an away there back in August 2006 when I was an MSIV. I also ended up matching there for residency.
As I recall, it was a pretty structured rotation, with didactics and also a schedule of which resident you were working with, although there was a lot of flexibility in that. I was the only visiting student and also the only MSIV that month, there were 2-3 other students with me on the rotation and they were Hopkins MSIIIs on their 2 week anesthesia elective.
Since you are doing an away, I'm guessing that you are interested in going there for residency or at least trying to get a letter of recommendation, so regardless of whether it is "super chill" I would assume that you are going to work hard, take call, and impress the hell out the right people. Try to work with chief residents and get some one on one time with senior faculty and ideally the program director.
I went out of my way to get that time when I was there: I wanted to work with the program director, but he was an excellent teacher in the OR and since it was August he was often paired with two CA-1s, usually in big cases. This meant that I would not really get to do anything in the OR. So I found out the attending who made the OR schedule, and even though I had never met her, paged her and boldly asked her to put him solo with no residents so I could get some face time with him. She did exactly that. I spent an entire day with him the OR, we did 5-6 outpatient cases, and he told me to take call with him the following night. I did a great job with the team that night, got a letter from him (which opened a lot of doors for me on the interview trail), and ultimately matched there.
So basically yeah, it is what you make of it, you can just do what you are assigned, but don't waste your time. Go get it.
