How difficult has it been to get rotations at the hospitals you want for your third year and fourth year required rotations?
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Depends on what you want and how popular that particular hospital is.
For 3rd year: You 1st enter a lottery to find out your schedule order. There's then a 2nd lottery to assign hospital spots. The 2 lotteries are independent, i.e. you can be at the bottom in both or at the top in both or some combination.
For the schedule lottery, there are 6 orders of rotations & you rank them in order of desirability. For the hospital lottery, for every rotation you rank the hospitals in order. Not every hospital participates in every rotation, and some hospitals are desirable in 1 rotation, but not another - for example I didn't want to do ER at one place, but I DID want to do my 4th year Sub-I there. And different people value things differently, which means that even though I wanted X out of my surgery rotation, others wanted Y.
For 4th year, you first enter a lottery to rank the month and location of the 3 required (ER, Sub-I and Outpt. Medicine) rotations. Here, you can specify if location or timing is more important to you. After you get those results back, you go through another lottery for electives. This lottery has a hitch - you are given 10 points to "bid" for certain electives at a certain time/place. It's more complicated, but that's the gist of it.
We can also swap hospitals with others in third year if the person is doing the same rotation as you in the same time period. Both persons just go to Records & switch it.
4th year, you can go to Records and try to see what's available and switch your schedule.
Bottom line, most people are happy with the end results.
Kristi
