Wednesday . April 17 . 2002 . 9:17pm |
electives Today was the end of a three-day registration period for our fourth year electives. This is what I'll be doing: July: Peds ER. Pretty self-explanatory. Entails working shifts in the Pediatric ER, not unlike Doug Ross before George Clooney got too famous and had to leave the show. August: Hospitalist Sub-I. A sub-internship is basically an elective in which fourth year students get experience admitting and managing their own patients, taking call, and basically doing the work of an intern, though with more supervision and a smaller patient load. For practice, you see. Everyone needs to take at least one Sub-I in order to graduate, ostensibly to prove that we are capable of taking care of sick people 24/7 and not get anyone killed, ourselves included. September: GI Consult Service. I'll be part of a team that gets called to see patients in the hospital with GI problems. You know, like bleeds and obstructions and hepatitis and such. There will also be a chance to see some procedures, like endoscopies and biopsies or whatever. It should be really interesting, though I expect this will be a rather poopy rotation, because GI is just that way. In October, I'm also planning to do a PICU Sub-I (pretty much set though I haven't officially registered for it yet), and I'm taking the mandatory "Back to the Classroom" course in February. Advanced Clinical Pathophysiology and Therapeutics...I think that's the course title...anyway, a Back to the Classroom month is another graduation requirement. Fine with me. I'll have senioritis by February anyway (inflammation of the senior), so I'm cool with the idea of sitting in a dark room listening to lectures and looking at slides for a month. Additionally, we get two "free" months that we're free to schedule in any order that we want--I plan to take one month off in January for my residency interviews, and another month off in April, for vacation and whatever last minute wedding stuff we'll need to be doing by that time. I register for the rest of my electives in the fall or winter sometime, I'm not really sure, only to say that I know I don't have to do anything about them right this moment. It's exciting to finally get to schedule individual electives, based on one's own interests. They all look like they're going to be so much fun, I can't wait. It's the same as it was in college, though. So many courses look so great in the course catalogue, and you sign up for them all excitedly, buy all the books at the bookstore (even the optional ones) and show up the first day, all bright-eyed and eager, new notebook and Dr. Grip in hand. But by the middle of the semester, it's become just another annoying class that gets in the way of your social life, and you wonder why you thought it would be such a bright idea to sign up for a class with so much reading and so many assignments anyway. Like, kiss my ass, 30-page final paper! This will probably happen to me at some point next year. (What am I talking about "next year"? July is in, like, three months.) But whatever, it's still fun to be excited now. As a quasi-tangential aside: my last rotation of third year, starting May 20th, is five weeks of General Surgery. I just heard rumblings from the group currently on Surgery that the students on the Vascular Team have to round at 4:00am every morning, and don't get home anytime before 10 or 11:00pm. And that's the nights they're not on call. Team assignments are made on the basis of lottery--literally, picking out of a hat. If I get assigned to Vascular, I will cry. I really will, just watch me. Be good to me, lottery hat! xo Michelle |
