Totally agree with the first part. It's so that you don't freak out so much that you have 33% probabilities of working 30+ hours on your very first workday. However, q4?? I am on q3 and my call sometimes is as few hours as 25-26 on some rotations delivering the shift early on a weekend to over 34 hours. The US severely limits how many hours you have to work, in Mexico you don't. However as interns and still under the protection of mommy university hospitals generally don't force us to work at the hospital as prisoners for an entire month like residents do.
I'm only on an awesome Q6-a-thon because I apparently got a pardon from presenting myself to my call because I had to do my first CENEVAL exam last Friday. Hopefully nobody will ask this Monday, but if they have any issues they can talk to my rotation chief, I'm willing to recover the call some other night but I was really dead after that 12 hour exam.. plus I'm sick with a crappy cold I caught somewhere on the job. At least it wasn't ARDS causing infuenza + MRSA.
The poster seems awfully tired with rotations ending at 6 pm. I had far worse than that when I was a student in my rotation years. More like classes ending at 7-8 pm on my campus and an over 2 hour commute in two sardine packed buses in flooded waters everywhere standing up. After showing up home at around 8 or 9 pm, I still had to continue studying and showing up at wherever I had to be the next day at 7 am. Oh, I commuted to the hospitals by metro and bus to add even more exhaustion. In comparison working for 26 hours without barely any commute and free food is full of awesome. Plus I can actually rest a few hours at night if there isn't much action during call depending on the rotation. Sleeping on an operating table like a baby sure beats trying to snooze for a minute standing up carrying heavy books in a packed bus with horrible grupera music at full volume!
I find the post to be a tad bit severe as well. Med students aren't really in the hospital because of their lack of responsability status. If a student skips 3 days because of illness things wouldn't matter. I don't even know which student skips work at the job because I don't even understand their rotating schedules. And this is from a person who went to a university that enforces a minimum of 80% class assistance to even qualify for entry to the final exam. On call nights med students are always entitled to sleep at least 3 hours at least in Mexico (again, a country where imprisoning a resident for an entire month at their job because of some really dumb mistake probably caused by exhaustion in the first place is not only legal, it's considered "normal"). If med students are in such big issues, they seriously need to have a chat with their school dean. Just show 'em the medical bills the university has to pay.
Rotating sucks as a student because nobody lets you do stuff, half of it because yu don't know how to do anything, another part you legally can't do heroic things yet without heavy supervision and another part employees are too busy sometimes doing their own work to be losing time watch how you do something insanely slowly and having them do the paperwork for you to boot. Students under me are so scared to do even the easy paperwork they can do (history charts for a 3rd year??), you can barely ask them to even do that because they won't do it and since you're not even grading them, you just ignore them.
I think the best rotating students will ever get is if they are rotating with interns and fresh residents instead of attendings. Attendings will be best for classrooms classes at the hospital, but students should be working the most with interns to mostly grab a feel of what THEY will be doing the day they become interns themselves. I felt I learned far more being with the residents and interns at the Red Cross hospital when i was in ortho who taught stuff than rounds with another 15 people in the back lines in a major OB/GYN hospital where I wasn't even able to hear what they were saying. Plus at rounds I got the bad preception interns were always scared to death whereas those feelings dropped a lot when I hanged around a lot with an intern at one rotation and got to help him a bit with some of his scutwork. At the time I thought better a fresh student that slept well to draw that blood sample than an overworked intern on his last rotation post call. My hospital gives the students a great opportunity to work closely with interns to see what they will be doing in 1 year and the kind of responsabilities without the fluff and urban legends they will have.
