Third Year Orientation

Last week, I spent my first of many long days to come at Sparrow Hospital getting oriented to what my 3rd year would be like. To be honest, about 50% of it was common sense or things we have already learned (ex: dress code, professionalism, how to give an oral presentation), but the other 50% was pretty useful information. Most important of this information was getting trained on two different EMR systems, which are ridiculously confusing. Hopefully it doesn't take me too long to really understand the EMR during clerkships.

In addition to lots of talks about what to expect during third year, we finally got our finalized schedules. We had a one-on-one meeting with our clinical coordinator months ago, so we kind of knew what our schedules would look like, but only our first rotation was guaranteed. Overall, I got almost exactly what I wanted...so I'm happy. My schedule is as follows:

1) Internal Medicine (2 months)
2) Surgery (2 months)
3) Ob/Gyn (2 months)
*Winter Break*
4) Family Medicine (2 months)
5) Pediatrics (2 months)
6) Elective (1 month) [Not entirely sure what I'm going to do...maybe a research month? maybe anesthesia?]
7) Psych (1 month)

We were also given our swipey badges to have access to all over the hospital and to get out of the parking lot for free (woo!)... AND we were given our pagers! All of us immediately whipped out our iPhones to take pictures of our new pagers, 'cuz thats pretty cool. At least, it seemed cool until our Clinical Coordinator stated that "we must have these pagers on us 24/7 from now until you graduate." Then, my whole class collectively realized that maybe we shouldn't be as excited for something that we will surely get sick of very quickly!

Now that I'm done with orientation, I have realized that this is it. Tomorrow morning, I will be marching into Sparrow Hospital to start my very first day of third year with real doctors, real residents, and (most importantly) real patients. I am so nervous, so terrified, so excited, so eager...but I feel like this is normal for an incoming M3 that has absolutely no idea what to expect for the next 12 months. Wish me luck for my first day!