Failed an elective - what next?

[Aetherus]

10 hours ago, Snowmen said:

My school does the same thing and the reason is that they don't have quite enough clinical placements to have two classes of clerks overlap. By giving us electives at the beginning and end of clerkship, they can off-load some students and ensure that there isn't too many students at our teaching hospitals.

It still sucks, but at least there is some logic behind it.

Most students just end up doing their first elective within the Sherbrooke network where it's almost a running gag and expected that we will suck.

Queen’s also does not have room for two clerkship classes at the same time but they have it set up in a way that you have 6 weeks of electives in 3rd year that you do after doing 3X 6week blocks. So by that time you are 4.5 months into clerkship. It coincides with the 4th year doing their post CaRMS block 8 core rotation. Not having enough room for two classes is definitely not an excuse for sending your clerks on elective right off the bat.

[hero147]

Calgary is a weird school. I remember meeting some students from Calgary on the CaRMS tour who had to go back to Calgary for clinical duties during the first week of interviews to do call. I thought that was preposterous!

[jlkhhylyiluh6]

3 minutes ago, hero147 said:

Calgary is a weird school. I remember meeting some students from Calgary on the CaRMS tour who had to go back to Calgary for clinical duties during the first week of interviews to do call. I thought that was preposterous!

so they simultaneously have too many students at once while also not having enough to spread out the call frequency evenly. fuckinglol

[blah1234]

In my experience (still a very limited sample size in the grand scheme of things) I can't say I ever felt a significant general skill gap from elective students from Calgary or Mac. 

While the elective schedule timing might be a disadvantage I still think historically those schools have students do fine on the match for a variety of specialties. 

[ChemPetE]

Except for this year when the pressure was ramped up yet again in Carms.

It's a known disadvantage for U of C, and I don't expect it to change anytime soon. It hasn't stopped people from matching top, competitive programs though. It's something I counselled the students I was mentoring many times before, that low stake electives are best scheduled first ,and high stakes right up until carms if possible. And with the possibility of many students having electives post carms, it also makes the clerkship track lottery high stakes, and even moreso in recent years. Best any student entering the track can communicate with their coordinator and evaluator early on to adjust any expectations. 

Definitely worth bringing it up with the UME and talking options with them. I would try hard to get that adjusted through any means, don't use that site for a letter, and make sure to kick ass in any subsequent electives and have it made known in your dean's letter that you both showed improvement and excelled. If in this case it were something like emerge/plastics/optho/derm etc etc and you are still gunning for it, and presumably you have more electives in the same specialty immediately lined up, you should gun hard and eat/breath/sleep that clinical material to make up the clinical difference, perceive or real. 

[PilotMD]

On ‎3‎/‎11‎/‎2019 at 1:26 PM, NLengr said:

Honest to God, what kind of douchebag blowhard academic physician fails a visiting clerk on their first rotation? Unless you walked in on them stabbing a patient to death, just give the kid a 5/10 (or some middle of the road grade) and a couple comments on areas to improve. 

Going to completely agree here. At your level, the MOST I would expect of a student intern is that they are hardworking with a good attitude and a willingness to learn. You check those boxes, you pass the rotation. Everything else is gravy....these physicians obviously take themselves way too seriously (and honestly, most physicians in general are absolutely terrible at presentations themselves). Touch base with the UME people as others have suggested - and try to move past it. Don't let these a$$holes ruin the rest of your clerkship experience.

PMD

[GrouchoMarx]

Electives are such bullshit

[brady23]

Wow that's so unfortunate. 

I do think they should've given you a heads up and even a check in if they were "so concerned", so this is pretty unprofessional behaviour from them. And extremely unfair to place that much emphasis on knowledge, I get it's an elective, but soft skills should be way more important.

I'd take it up with your faculty office, hopefully there's a hidden flag to never do an elective there for future clerks.

[shady]

There's a lot of comments about Mac in this thread. To clear the air, as a Mac grad, I never felt a problem with the elective schedule. I had 4 weeks of electives in the beginning of clerkship and I used them to rotate through specialties I didn't want to match to. In the end, it was excellent in CaRMS because I used it to argue that I took the time to explore specialties before settling on what I want.

What happened to OP is unfortunate and in my opinion unacceptable. Whoever wrote the evaluation must have absurd expectations. If it does show up for CaRMS, then OP you should appeal in whichever way you can. But I want to make clear that of the 203 people in my class, all of which started with electives, no one ran into such a scenario.