While many medical students are happy doing their clinical clerkships and elective rotations nearby their home school, some M3 and M4 students either want to or need to do away electives. So, I want to take the opportunity here to outline the challenges in finding away rotations and a few tips and tricks to help you land the clinical rotations you want in the city you are aiming for.
Away rotations offer medical students a few opportunities that you can’t get by doing all of your rotations at your home campus:
- You get the opportunity to meet staff and residency reviewers before you apply to match at a particular institution.
- You are able to “test drive” a particular city that you might think you want to live in for your residency.
- You can get a feel for the culture of the hospital or institution where you will be working to see if it is a true fit.
When you start the process of looking for a place to do rotations, you will quickly find that the rotations come with a lot of strings attached. The following are just some of the challenges that I’ve heard from medical students passing through Chicago:
- Not all hospitals or schools take foreign medical students.
- Not all hospitals or schools take LCME medical students.
- Many hospitals or schools give very strong preference to their local medical students over visiting medical students.
- You have to pay some pretty significant fees at some hospitals to do your rotations there.
So, there is a lot to know and a lot to check out, but there are some pretty decent resources out on the web for free:
- The American Assocation of Medical Colleges (AAMC) provides a free resource called the Extramural Electives Compendium that contains information for all of the US and Canadian accredited medical schools. While this is usually pretty good, they don’t do the best job of keeping links up to date (as most schools change their links annually).
- The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) provides a free resource called the Medical Student Rotation Catalog. As you may have already guessed, this is for Emergency Medicine Rotations only, but it is pretty decent. It may also lead you to websites where you can find other departmental rotations.
- I leave this one near the end as I am the biased creator, but the MedBed Rotation Finder Application takes care of many of the above issues by researching limitations and requirements of each rotation and checking the links monthly for problems. It is constantly changing and is also offered free.
- Finally, if all else fails, start contacting hospitals directly or scouring their website. Good search terms for finding information on a particular website are: medical student, visiting student and clinical rotations. You may also want to directly contact anyone in charge of the residency program. They can usually tell you very quickly if they take medical students.
I continue to find new rotations and new ways of finding them out there, but the above should get you started. Good luck with your rotations and upcoming matches.
