Yeah, the problem with “poor regions of the world” is that it’s not modern medicine.
Yeah, I haven’t found that to be the case for qualified and confident students. If that happens, maybe you really should have picked another clerkship.
Some medical schools have “away” rotations due to insufficient opportunities or lack of a particular service line at their main hospital.
I know medical schools that offer their students opportunities to complete the Ob/Gyn rotation at Parkland Hospital that averages 50 deliveries per day. I’ve heard of students delivering 50+ babies within that month. At my school, anything more than 3 deliveries per student was exceedingly rare.
Although I attended a large tertiary care hospital, my family medicine rotation occurred at a rural hospital where the family physicians were the predominant providers. The school discouraged family medicine rotations at the main campus due to competing services by specialists.
It is critical to ask a medical school where the rotations will be completed. A student might be attracted to multiple remote opportunities across different states or just prefer to remain within one hospital.
It was not exactly the impression that I was getting from my D. about 'away" rotations. First, they had 3 main hospitals to rotate at locality and while one was connected to her Med. School, 2 others were not. It was entirely up to a student to apply to whatever rotation (aside from the fact that they had to complete a core set of specialties). And that included applying to away rotations if it is desired. My D. contemplated on one, but decided that it is way too inconvenient. But the only reason that she would be doing it was to obtain additional II. Specifically, in her chosen specialty, the med. students are not allowed to do anything at all (aside from taking history). She knew that.
One might think that having the world’s #1 trauma center on the list of clerkships would be a serious student’s dream come true, but it turns out that all that history and experience means that everyone has their job and it’s more cut and dried than many people realize, among other things.
So, if you really want some trauma experience, you might go for a clerkship at an underfunded big city knife-and-gun club.
Of course, there are always the groups of students who share lists of clerkships that have minimum duty expectations. And, the number one justification there is that “they’re not trying to match in it, so what’s the point?”
LECOM is one of those schools where students rotate, not by choice, through multiple hospitals within 2 states for their 3rd and 4th year clerkships.
Just another example of why it sounds like a great idea to consider clinical rotations when choosing a medical school but in practice is really, really, really difficult to make sense of what’s up and what’s down.
Big, HUGE, structural differences in curriculum, yes, pay attention to things like required rural rotations, lack of a freestanding children’s hospital (if you are at all interested in pediatrics or a pediatric subspecialty of a surgical field), some sort of really unique required rotation like IWWBB mentioned in post #46, or some other, glaring, obvious factor. But in general, the combination of student naivete as a pre-med, uncertainty on career path, variety of factors relating to what clerkship experiences actually end up being, and so on make me believe that it’s really just not worth the time, effort, and consideration to be a major consideration if you are one of the lucky ones to have a decision to make.
As for away rotations - limiting my discussion to those during the M4 year that must be applied to through the Visiting Student Application Service - their utility depends on the field. For some they are an absolute must - Ortho in particular places a high priority on completion of an away. For others they are useful for exposure to a field either unavailable at your home institution or one that your home institution doesn’t allow students to rotate through - this commonly occurs in pediatric subspecialties. International ones are a great post-interview/ROL opportunity too, as such travel becomes much harder to complete after that M4 year.