So today marks my last day of my orthopaedics rotation at LLU, and I really had a blast. As I look back on my 2 weeks I feel somewhat that I didn’t work as hard as I expected. There were 3 students on the rotation, and in order for us not to overlap in the OR or for overnight calls I was only able to work about 88 hours per week. That may seem like a lot, but it was no where near to the 120 hours/week that other students said they were doing when they rotated. Either way, I feel like I really hit it off well with the chair of our ortho department. Our chair is already a super nice and likable guy, but the great thing is that he isn’t averse to positive compliments of students. At the end of 2 weeks he told me that I did a very good job on the rotation, which was reassuring. Although as crazy as this application and interview process is, that could just be a generic comment that he gives to all rotating students. But yeah, it still felt good.
At the end of the rotation, every rotating student is supposed to give a PPT presentation on a patient they saw in the ED, including a analysis of the X-ray (displayed on the big screen) and the pertinent information about the patient’s condition. I had the opportunity to observe 2 other student’s presentations and I thought they were quite good. I was a little worried about my presentation because I didn’t have time to work on it until the night before…while I was ON CALL! But God is truly good because that night was the lightest call I have ever had, and I had the whole night to work on the presentation. I did it on a patient who presented with a nasty Schatzker type VI tibial plateau fracture that he sustained during a motorcycle accident. Since I was giving the last presentation after a long morning of grand rounds presentations, I had to really fly through my presentation. Our program director is notorius for asking very hard questions during student presentations, but I praise God that I knew the answers, and when I finished the presentation, no one had any questions…which is pretty unheard of. So I’m not sure whether they didn’t have questions because they were just ready to leave or whether they just felt that the presentation was thorough, but afterward a couple of attendings and residents said that I gave an excellent presentation. So yeah, it was good to end my rotation with a strong oral presentation.
Overall I really am impressed with LLU’s program. The residents get a ton of OR experience and the didactics are on point too, allowing them to do well on the OITE. Its just so hard however to know exactly where you stand with a program. For the most part a program will say positive things to you when you rotate in order to get all the students to rank their program highly, giving them the power to pick and choose which applicants they want. When the NRMP Match was created, it was designed to be in the applicants favor. The only way that a program can get the match to be in their favor is if a lot of students rank them #1 so that when they submit their rank list, they are more likely to get exactly who they want. So regardless of what LLU, AMC, Hopkins, or Howard says to me, I need to still make my rank list according to how I liked the programs, not how much I THINK each program liked me.
Tonight I board the plane for MD, and then on Sunday morning I will drive down to Atlanta to start my next rotation at AMC!
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