Originally posted by Rendar5
Cornell (leave the P&S spot open for me). Ok, now to get serious:
Cornell has much better early clinical experience, period. But that's not as important as you think it is from talking to MS3's and 4's. I was originally looking for schools with better early clinical experiences, but it's the 3rd and 4th year of school which is what really counts in the long run. However, I still think that some level of pre-clinical exposure is something important, at least to break up the monotony of books and classes. Both schools, I think, ahve that minimum if you want it. AT Columia you'll have to choose to do this. At Cornell it will happen naturally. That's my late-night opinion.
Good advice late at night, if you can decipher what I said 
Well, I can't comment on Cornell's clinical exposure in year one, but I can tell you first hand that there are plenty of opportunities at Columbia. First of all, we have one afternoon a week dedicated to early clinical exposure. This is a part of our Clinical Practice course (an "art of medicine" course), and we get evaluations and everything, the whole nine yards. There are many options for these "clerkships," from shadowing a physician one-on-one to rotating through the ER to even doing social work with a group like The Door. You fill out a form with your preferences, and then you're matched to a clerkship. This placement lasts for the first half of the year, after which you fill out a second form and get placed again for the second half of the year.
In addition to this required clerkship, there are plenty of elective things you can do. Off the top of my head, there's an elective where you shadow an anesthesiologist for a day, and there's one where you spend a night in labor and delivery. There's also a kidney transplant program where you get matched to a patient waiting to be transplanted. You follow them, watch the surgery, and then follow-up on them after the surgery. There are also other programs run by the Surgery Club where you have access to a trauma beeper, heart transplant beeper, and liver transplant beeper. When the beeper goes off, you get called in to watch the case. In the case of the transplant beepers, you get to pick up the organ (even if they have to hop a jet because the organ's in another state, you still get to tag along), follow them back, and watch the surgery. This year, we're starting a student run clinic, so there are lots of ways to get involved there if you want to. And if all of that is not enough, lots of the doctors around here are happy to have first years trailing around behind them, so you can just make arrangements with someone on your own too.
There's lots more too, but I think I've gotten my point across that there're plenty of opportunities for early clinical exposure at P&S. This is actually the case at most schools nowadays, and I'm sure Cornell has many similar programs. But I'll leave that for one of the East Siders to tell you about.
As always, if you have any questions about Columbia, feel free to PM me. I don't get around to checking pre-allo too often, but I'll always respond to PMs. Good luck with the decision, ILovetheOC. You can't go wrong either way.
