Visiting clerkships in 3rd year?

[Idiopathic]

Who here did a substantial away rotation and got good face time with a program during 3rd year. With our required scehdule of rotations undecided as of this moment, the time between end of 3rd year and whenever apps are due is only about 3 months. Is that enough time to rotate through places and get some quality letters?

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[doc05]

you can do away rotations as an MS3, though it's difficult. Some schools won't let you go away until MS4. And others will only take visiting students as MS4's. Not to mention certain clerkships which may be prerequisites. The best thing to do is plan ahead, and try to go away if you can (and want to).

 

[BPKurtz]

Originally posted by Idiopathic
Who here did a substantial away rotation and got good face time with a program during 3rd year. With our required scehdule of rotations undecided as of this moment, the time between end of 3rd year and whenever apps are due is only about 3 months. Is that enough time to rotate through places and get some quality letters?

If you're trying to get letters to send to specific programs at which you'd be rotating, you can do away rotations as a 4th year in July, August, Sept, Oct, or even November. Hypothetically December or January but that's a little more iffy and starts interfering with your interview scheduling. If you were going to do an away rotation at a specific hospital, I suppose you could send a letter from your attending there to all of the programs, but it wouldn't make a ton of sense. It might just raise the eyebrows of the other programs when they reviewed your letters --"oh, I guess this guy wants to go to such and such a program, he even got them to write a letter for him. Screw him then." What makes MORE sense is having faculty within a program write a letter to that institution's program director talking about how amazing you are and how he'd be a fool to not rank you highly. This kind of letter holds a decent amount of weight because the PD sees the faculty member of his home institution as more of a known quantity rather than potentially some yahoo at your institution who is paying you back for babysitting his kids and mowing his lawn. For those kinds of letters, they are more outside the realm of your official ERAS and the attending you worked with should just send them to the PD directly. Timing doesn't matter as long as they send the letter before the program's rank list is set (February I think?).

bpkurtz