Welcome to the latest Matchpal blog post, dedicated to helping you navigate the challenging yet rewarding journey of clinical rotations as a third year medical students. Whether you’re just starting or are well into your rotations, we’ve got tips to ensure success in the hospital, excel in shelf exams, and maintain a healthy work-life balance.
1. Establish Strong Foundations:
- Take time to familiarize yourself with the hospital’s layout, key personnel, and protocols. The early investment into this will pay off dividends during busy shifts.
- Build relationships with nurses, residents, and attendings. These will be your greatest allies during the next year.
- Develop your study routine from day 1 and try to stick with it as consistently as possible! Be reasonable with your own expectations, you will be tired and having a hill to climb will feel more realistic than a mountain.
- Use Q-banks, flash cards, and textbooks/articles/videos/podcasts. Implement these into your day whenever you have downtime for efficiency.
- Reading about the pathologies your daily patients are suffering from and the treatment plans your teams are implementing allows you to retain information better.
2. Be Proactive and Engaged:
- Volunteer for procedures and patient interactions whenever possible. Every single day has numerous learning opportunities that you should be at the forefront of.
- Seek feedback regularly and use it as a tool for improvement. So many students fail to do this, and lose a critical opportunity to grow / improve and also develop relationships with their preceptors.
- Come prepared to rounds daily with pertinent information, enthusiasm, and questions.
3. Effective Time Management:
- Prioritize tasks by urgency and importance. This includes work/study related and personal life duties!
- Create a daily checklist.
- Keep patient and procedure logs handy
- Utilize downtime in the hospital to work on studying so you have less to do at home!
4. Enjoy Life Outside of Work
- Prioritize your own wellness because no one else will do it for you.
- We know this sounds cliche, but it is absolutely critical that you use non-exam weekends to reconnect with friends and family and take a break from the grind. There will unfortunately alwaus be work you can do but it doesnt mean you should. Recharging and preparing your mind and body for the next week will pay off greater dividends in the long term than pushing yourself to exhaustion for short term gain.