This thread is for students and graduates of UCE who have been through clinical rotations at Dominican hospital sites and want to share what that experience actually looked like. The question we hear most from prospective students is not just whether the rotations happen but what they are like in practice. How involved are students on the wards? What kinds of cases do you see? How do Dominican attendings and residents treat medical students? What are the gaps between training in the Dr. and what you encounter when you transition to US-based clerkships? And on the flip side, what did rotating in the Dr. give you that turned out to be an unexpected advantage once you got to the US? We want honest, detailed, ground-level accounts. This thread will be pinned to the UCE profile page and used as a reference for incoming students making decisions about their clinical years.
i’ll open this because i just finished my Dr. rotations and am about to start my US clerkships so i am sitting right at the transition point. the most important thing i want people to understand is that rotating in the Dr. is not a placeholder until the real training starts in the US. it is real training. the patients are real, the presentations are real, the decisions being made on those wards are real. i have done physical exams on more patients in my Dr. rotations than most of my friends at US programs will do in their entire third year. the volume alone is a significant advantage that i did not fully appreciate until i started talking to people at other schools.
the case mix in Dominican public hospitals is something i want to describe specifically because it is not what people expect. you see advanced presentations of diseases that in the US get caught earlier because people have better access to primary care. late stage TB, decompensated heart failure in patients who have been managing symptoms at home for months, obstetric emergencies, pediatric malnutrition, dengue at every stage, parasitic infections, complications from poorly controlled diabetes. it sounds heavy and it is. but what it does to your clinical eye is significant. by the time i got to my US clerkship in internal medicine my differential thinking was genuinely broader than my co-students and my attendings noticed it.
i graduated three years ago and matched into emergency medicine in illinois. i want to address the question of how Dr. training translates to the US because it is the most important question in this thread. the honest answer is that the translation is imperfect but the foundation is strong. in the Dr. you develop core skills: history taking, physical examination, pattern recognition, clinical reasoning without over-reliance on technology. those things are fully transferable. what requires adjustment when you get to the US is the documentation culture, the EMR, the way teams are structured, and the liability-driven approach to ordering tests. the core clinical thinking you built in the Dr. does not need to be rebuilt. it just needs to be adapted to a different system.
The volume point is so real and i want to add something to it. In the Dr. hospital setting there are not enough staff to go around so as a student you end up filling gaps in a way that would not happen in a well-resourced US teaching hospital where there is always a resident or intern between you and the patient. that means you are doing more, earlier, with less supervision. for some students that is terrifying at first. for the ones who lean into it, the learning curve is steep in the best possible way. By my second rotation i was presenting patients with a level of confidence i did not expect to have at this stage.