I don’t know what happened or why I wasn’t warned by my classmates, but now that I am nearing the end of my 3rd year, pediatrics seems to be the most difficult rotation that I have been on. Truly it is internal medicine for kids, but its even more. I feel like when I was on Internal Medicine and I was on call and in the ED admitting patients, the admit would only take about 30 min tops. But each and every pediatrics admit takes 1 hr plus. I think the majority of my time is actually spent writing the admission notes because they want me to be more detailed than I have been on any other rotation…even psych! In addition to that, the majority of folks that I have talked to said that the pediatrics shelf exam is by far the most difficult, even more so than medicine and surgery. It just shouldn’t be this hard, but it is. I am so looking forward to being done with this rotation and getting on to family medicine and 4th year.
If it’s any comfort I actually thought the peds mock board was pretty easy :]. I used mostly first aid, with some pretest, case files and usmleworld thrown in. But then again, if you’re not interested in the subject — I can see that it would be hard to study!
Good luck 🙂