Start 3rd year w/ anesthesia elective?

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kl323

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Hey all,

How doable is anesthesia as a very first rotation in my 3rd year? I don't think I want to pursue anesthesia. At my school, it is a relatively short and light rotation. I feel it can prepare me for Medicine, EM, and Surgery (which will be the rotations that follow). And when I say prepare, I'm not talking about prepping me to be a rock star on those rotation, but it definitely beats starting with neuro.

ThoughtS?

Thanks for reading!
 
Anesthesia would be a fine first rotation, especially if you dont want to go into it. The expectations of any July 1 MS 3 are low, and this should be true on anesth.
 
Hey all,

How doable is anesthesia as a very first rotation in my 3rd year? I don't think I want to pursue anesthesia. At my school, it is a relatively short and light rotation. I feel it can prepare me for Medicine, EM, and Surgery (which will be the rotations that follow). And when I say prepare, I'm not talking about prepping me to be a rock star on those rotation, but it definitely beats starting with neuro.

ThoughtS?

Thanks for reading!

Anesthesia was my second MS3 rotation, right after 6 weeks of abusively awful general surgery. It was awesome.
 
Anesthesia was my second MS3 rotation, right after 6 weeks of abusively awful general surgery. It was awesome.

This was my exact start to ms3. The contrast of surgery and anesthesia was impressive. I liked the OR but didnt like surgery - anesthesia seemed perfect, and the rest of the year confirmed that.

You will learn some medicine and some surgery so you will at least have some basis for the rest of the year.
 
Thanks for the replies!

This puts my mind at ease.
 
anesthesia would be a fun start, but honestly I think you'd get more out of it if you'd already done a rotation or two, preferably surgery to get used to the OR. Also, I don't think it would really do all that much to help prepare you for your other rotations, while neuro would at least help you get used to the wards.
 
Anesthesia was my first rotation third year. Before then I wasn't really interested in the field. It was a great, hands on way to start third year. Although I liked several rotations during third year, it was clear at the end that I wanted to apply into anesthesiology. Good luck during your third year, keep an open mind during all your clerkships.
 
Anesthesia was my second MS3 rotation, right after 6 weeks of abusively awful general surgery. It was awesome.

This was my experience. I didn't have too much trouble getting through it... actually, the pharm from Step I helped a lot.

Also, I didn't expect to go into anesthesia (was thinking IM or Peds at the time), but I wound up loving the rotation and it stuck.

You should do fine. Enjoy.


BTW. don't worry about being an all-star. If it does click, you can do 4th year rotations and make up for not knowing what you were doing that first month of 3rd year.
 
I think doing an anesthesia rotation in July will probably kind of suck. Where I trained, we never had med students on anesthesia in July or August because the CA-1's (who the med students tend to get stuck with) are brand new, don't tend to know much, are stressed out, and are (rightly) hesitant to give up procedures (i.e. intubations, a-lines, even IVs) to med students. July is a bad time to do any "procedure-heavy" rotation. All the new interns/residents need to learn to sew, deliver babies, place lines, intubate, etc and med students often get to "learn by osmosis" while observing new trainees.

however, if you have no interest in anesthesia, it's probably a great time to schedule a rotation where frazzled CA-1's will gladly jettison you by 10 am just to get you out of their hair.
 
Related question... Will be finishing up 3rd year this summer and plan to do many anesthesia rotations starting September onward. Very interested in doing Anesthesia as a residency.

Any advice for what books/audios/videos/cases...etc to read for a new 4th year just starting their first anesth. elective?
 
Related question... Will be finishing up 3rd year this summer and plan to do many anesthesia rotations starting September onward. Very interested in doing Anesthesia as a residency.

Any advice for what books/audios/videos/cases...etc to read for a new 4th year just starting their first anesth. elective?

NMS Anesthesia is a pretty nice FAST read. Easily done in a month that you'll be pulling gunner hours. Plus it fits in scrub pockets.

Baby Miller is probably a good reference book and there are some chapters in there that are worth reading.

I tried reading a copy of Anesthesia Secrets, but there's not a lot in there that is aimed at the beginning medical student's level.
 
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