Clerkship

[Guest medsplease]

I was wondering if anyone could provide some more specific information on electives during clerkship. I realize there are 10 weeks of electives during clerkship but I have some more specific questions. Can anyone help?

 

1) When are the electives during clerkship? Are they at the beginning, middle, end? How is it broken up? What is the clerkship schedule like?

 

2) How many weeks of electives do you get during clerkship (not including pre-clerkship) before CaRMS applications are due? Specficaly what month are CaRMS due in 3rd year?

 

3) Finally, in general for those of you in clerkship or finished, how prepared did you feel in clerkship?

 

Thanks guys for answering the any of the above questions!

[Guest frogcanada]

Hey there

 

1) Electives are spread out during clerkship, depending on which 'schedule' you get (each schedule is completed by anywhere from ~3-6 students). But almost everyone gets 6 weeks of electives right up front. Then the other 4 weeks can be anytime during clerkship, and may be split up into two and two weeks. The clerkship schedule basically just includes all your mandatories (fam med, internal, surgery, anesth, psych, peds, obs/gyn) plus all your electives, in any order you can imagine (there are something like 24 'schedules' as mentioned above). This is so each schedule has a reasonable number of students in it, and no schedule is overloaded. So in terms of what your schedule is 'like', depends on what schedule you get. My schedule has all the 'lighter' rotations up front and at the end, and the tougher ones clumped in the middle. Not ideal, but not the worst I could have. My tradeoff is that I get all my electives before CARMS (see below).

 

2) 10 weeks of electives during clerkship. Depending on what schedule you get (see above), you may not have all of them before CARMS applications. You're almost guaranteed to get 6 weeks upfront before CARMS, and may well get all 10 weeks before CARMS. But a few rotations have electives after CARMS. But this is under your control because you rank various schedules, so you submit a list picking your #1,2,3,4 choice etc all the way down. And someone may correct me on this, but I'm pretty sure no one in our class got lower than their 4th choice rotation. And there are more than 4 rotations with all 10 electives upfront. So not to worry about that. Can't remember when CARMS applications are due, but it's generally in the Sept - Nov time period. There are different deadlines for different documents (I think your part of the application is early Oct, reference letters are late Nov or something like that).

 

3) Tough question as we're still really at the beginning of clerkship in my class. I had alot of electives upfront so this question doesn't really apply to me as much. But I've felt relatively well prepared in my one mandatory I've done.

 

FC

[Guest medsplease]

Thanks for your answer!