UVA students...question about away clerkships

[funshine]

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Hi everyone,

I will most likely be attending UVA for med school next year. 😍 Hurrah!!
However, I still have some concerns over the required away clerkships 3rd year. I understand that sometimes working at a smaller clinic serving rural populations is advantageous in that you get even more hands-on experience. However, what if you're planning to practice in a big city? Do you think it would be wise to gain clinical experience in an urban environment instead?

Also, I'm concerned that all this time away during 3rd year will mean additional hours spent at Charlottesville come 4th year. Would this not become a problem if you wanted to do an elective elsewhere...say at an institution where you want to apply for residency?

Thanks a lot! I'm really excited to be attending UVA.

Also, a random question: how is the diversity there?

 

[njbmd]

Hi everyone,

I will most likely be attending UVA for med school next year. 😍 Hurrah!!
However, I still have some concerns over the required away clerkships 3rd year. I understand that sometimes working at a smaller clinic serving rural populations is advantageous in that you get even more hands-on experience. However, what if you're planning to practice in a big city? Do you think it would be wise to gain clinical experience in an urban environment instead?

Also, I'm concerned that all this time away during 3rd year will mean additional hours spent at Charlottesville come 4th year. Would this not become a problem if you wanted to do an elective elsewhere...say at an institution where you want to apply for residency?

Thanks a lot! I'm really excited to be attending UVA.

Also, a random question: how is the diversity there?

Hi there,
The most significant away rotation at UVa is in Roanoke which is much larger than Charlotteville and a great rotation especially if you can get surgery at the VA in Salem. Charlottesville is not a large city but more of a college town. UVa is the major draw for C'ville and makes the town a wonderfully cultured spot. Doing a required rotation at a distant clinical affiliate does not mean that you have to spend more time in C'ville during fourth year.

You can do your away rotations fourth year at places that you wish to do residency if you desire. UVa does not place limits on fourth year electives as long as they are established and meet their elective criteria.

Diversity at UVa is fairly good and getting better all of the time. There is a wonderful Dean of Diversity who is very supportive of students of color. Charlottesville is a very sophisticated town with great restaurants and neat little places to live. It is about a 2 hour drive to Washington, DC which is about the most diverse spot that one can find. I think you will enjoy C'ville and UVa is wonderful.

njbmd 🙂

 

[funshine]

Thanks, njbmd! I keep forgetting that Charlottesville, as wonderful as it may be, is still "just" a college-town. I may PM you in the future about housing questions.

 

[mayostand]

Also funshine, I'm pretty sure some of the third year rotations can be taken in NoVa, which will give you a nice urban exposure. Peds, IM, and FM maybe? I'm an M2 so I'll be finding out more specifics this spring. That said, I've also heard Salem is the place to go if you're thinking about surgery.

 

[aquaboy]

As a 3rd year I will give my input. You can only do peds in NoVA. You can do surgery or IM in Salem. You can do surgery, IM, psych, Ob/Gyn in Roanoke. Also you can be shipped anywhere in the state for 1 month of your outpatient IM month or during you family med month. No one is supposed to spend more than 22 wks. away unless they want to.

 

[funshine]

Thanks for your responses! 🙂 I have a couple other questions for you all. Do med students have free access to classes in other departments outside of medicine/science? Do you guys have time for that kind of thing?

What activities outside of medicine do you generally participate in? I got the impression that UVA med students were very athletic—lots of intramural sports—which is cool, except I don’t play. I’m more interested in the music/dance opportunities that might be available, so if anyone can elaborate on those, that’d be helpful.

Oh, and should I be expecting many of my classmates to be in serious relationships already? I know it always differs by class, but I figured maybe Virginians are more conservative and get married at a younger age…

Thanks!

 

[vietstud101]

I'm a first year, and yeah, I would say that a lot of my classmates are pretty athletic. Some are ridiculously good at every sport. But aside from sports, there is an acapella group, and I think every week, a groups of students go out salsa dancing. A few of my classmates get together, sometimes with faculty and play instruments.

As for relationships, I think there are 6 or 7 married classmates, and maybe the same number are engaged. Also, I feel that probably half of the remaining class was in a relationship before school started.

I"m not sure about access to other classes. I"m pretty sure 4th year you can take any class offered at UVA. Shoot, for the amount of money we pay in tuition, we better get something for free haha.

 

[Wahoos]

Hey Funshine, that is great you are coming to UVA for medical school! It is a great decision and you will love the 4 yrs in C'ville. I did my medical school at UVA and I am a Ortho intern right now so I can give you a good assessment of UVA. You can search my old posts about my thoughts on the school. Just to give you a quick run down of the things that I really enjoyed about UVA. You will love the professors at UVA... most of them care very much about teaching and they really put in the time to help you learn. The school also listen to the students, I know when I did my first year in 2001, the microbiology class was very unorganized and the exams were all very unfair. Alot of the students in my class complained and made many recs to change the cirriculum. There was a lot of changes to that class and I think the current UVA students who are taking that Micro class have a much better experience than 4 yrs ago. Also when I went through, all the classes were graded as A, A-, B+, B, etc, and that was stressful. Now all the classes are just pass / fail / and I think the top 15% are honors (not sure). The people in your class will be very nice and very talented. As for athletics, quite a few people will be college athletes..... and there will be a lot of musical talents in your class, just go to the annual medical student talent show to see for yourself. As a third year med student, you will be away alot, 3-5 months, but the away rotations will give you great experience. As a 4th yr med student, the whole year is elective, except for 1 month of neurology. I did 2 months of Orthopedics aways, spent 6 wks in Spain, and then we had 7 wks of vacation time. So your last yr at UVA is sweet. There is plenty to do, the gym is always packed with people. Tons of runners on the street, and UVA was given the name as "the fittest college in America" by Kaplan. Alot of good restaurants in town, there is salsa dancing on the weekend if you like that in downtown. There is fridays after 5 (concert in downtown) every week. etc, etc, etc. Plus our class passed down all the outlines, notes, etcs, etcs, things that we made to help with the 1st 2 yrs, and I think that one of the classes put it all on a CD and make a copy for everyone for the incoming MS I. So everyone is very helpful at UVA. I can go on and on about why I really liked my experience there,... if you need any help/advice feel free to PM me. Also check out the match list from my yr, 2005. Alot of my classmates matched into top residencies.

 

[nala]

Nice post, Wahoos...Just to confirm some things you said:
• yes, all 1st and 2nd year classes are now strictly P/F. At the end of the
first 2 years the top 20% gets honors.
• Micro is now probably the most organized course in the first 2 years. Our current course director is JDT (the person who was in charge of it for years suddenly died this summer).
• Still very true about each class sending out charts and stuff. The class above mine always sent out their charts and high-yield fact sheets.
• The neuro rotation has been moved to 3rd year. They are also completely re-doing the curriculum so that 3rd year will finish earlier and you start fourth year sooner, giving you time to take more electives before you have to pick your specialty. Rumor is the current first year class will actually finish their 3rd year rotations in March of their third year and begin fourth year electives right away. I think that's great.
• There is definitely plenty to do in Cville.
The only other thing I would say is that I personally tend to find a lot of the students here to be a bit snobby. My class (I don't know about the others) is full of tiny little cliques that do not really interact with each other. My first year I tried to be friends with anyone, but ended up not really having any close friends because I didn't belong to any 1 "group." My second year I gave up and joined a "group." I still try and talk to other people in other "groups" but quite frankly, it doesn't usually work. It's really quite bizarre behavior.

 

[Wahoos]

nala, great post! You hit it on the nail with alot of things. Who died this summer???!!! Julie Turner was our course director in 2001 and that course was horrible when I took it. Glad things are much better now. The reorganization of the cirriculum is awesome and our class had complaint about the Neurology month in 4th year, glad that it is moved to 3rd year now. Plus we told Dean Pearson that how were we suppose to pick a speciality for the rest of our life when we don't even get to see alot of things during 3rd year, then all of sudden, in sept of 4th year, you start to apply to residency. Glad that UVA is really doing something to change that and give the incoming students time in the end of 3rd to do electives to see what they like before making a decision on the speciality.

Also when we went through the surgery rotation as a third year, our grades was 50% chief resident eval, 25% oral, and 25% written. Our class complaint because that the 50% eval from the chief was so random and chief dependant. Some chief would give you all 5s and some chiefs never give 5s to anyone, so your eval grade all depend on the luck of the draw (which chief is on service when you do the gen surg thing). Now I think the surgery clerkship is 50% oral and 50% written, am I right? I personally think that the surgery director at UVA, Dr. Tribble is probably one of the best physicians that I have ever worked with. He really cares about his patients and also about the medical student's education.

About the clicks, that happens in every class. My class, there were the people who go out all the time, the people who were married that hang out with each other, the frat type, the people who you never see/that do not go to class, the people that you see in the gym all the time, etc. I think when you put 130 people together, and they spend so much time with each other, clicks will always form. Plus it is like high school, people always gossip about things, classmates, who is doing who, who is AOA bound, who likes to sleep around with the undergrads, etc, etc. You really can't avoid that, and I think this "click" thing happens in every medical school. Just try your best to ignor it and do your own thing. 🙂

Overall, I really enjoyed the people in my med class.

 

[funshine]

Wahoos, nala, vietstud, thanks for your input! Yeah, cliquey-ness seems to be a universal trait among med schools...Nala, I can totally sympathize with what you're saying as my undergrad was rather snobby as well, and maintaining friendships in college was definitely a trying experience.

Umm, one more question about relationships. Do most people manage to stay in a committed relationship all through med school? I'm obsessing over this right now because I just entered a new one and though it's not serious yet, it really has the potential to work out in med school because we'll just be a 2-hr drive from each other. Still, we are kind of on separate life-paths, and maybe it'd be much easier just meeting someone with similar goals in med school. The question is whether I will meet anyone! I asked my friend (a third-year at Baylor) how her social life was going and she just laughed at me and said she didn't even have time to worry over those things.

Anyway, thanks for your input! I look forward to visiting UVA--do you think the second-look weekend coincides with the talent show? I'd love to watch 🙂

 

[nala]

Wahoos - Dr. Bob Kadner died this summer. I think it was in August about a week before school started. I think you're right too that surgery is now 50 oral/50 written.

To funshine - I'm in a long distance (4 hours apart) relationship now..we had been together for about a year when I started med school. It does suck at times but I think if you want it to work you can. There are a lot of people in long distance and long-term relationships here. There are tons of old threads on this topic if you search around SDN. Once you start school you will have less time for the person you're with, so it is important that you are with someone who understands that. If he/she doesn't understand that, then it seems like there would be limited success to that relationship...anyway only you know how close you are to this person and how you feel about each other. 2 hours apart isn't that much if you want to make it work.

About the cliques too..I hope I didn't make it sound too bad. I believe it is like that everywhere just by nature. When I started here I was just a bit surprised at how stand-offish some of my fellow classmates were.