This is one of the most common questions we see from third and fourth year students preparing to enter the clinical phase, as well as from prospective students trying to understand what the AUB medical program looks like beyond the classroom. We want to hear from students and recent graduates who have gone through rotations at AUBMC or affiliated sites. What does a typical rotation day look like? How are students treated by residents and attendings? What did you learn that you couldn’t have learned from a textbook? What were the hardest parts? How did it shape where you want to go with your career? Share your real experience here, the details matter.
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i just finished my internal medicine rotation and the honest answer is that it varies a lot depending on which team you land on. some attendings will pull you into everything, let you present patients, ask you questions on rounds, make you feel like you’re actually part of the team. others will basically forget you’re there. you have to be proactive about showing up and making yourself useful or you will just stand at the back of the room for six weeks and learn very little.
a typical day in surgery starts early. like 5:30 or 6am early depending on the service. you pre-round on patients before the residents get there, which means knowing your patients’ vitals, overnight events, labs, the whole picture. then you round with the team, then there might be OR time if you’re lucky enough to scrub in. afternoons are usually either clinic or reading on your own. you are tired all the time but in a way that feels different from exam tired. it’s a physical tiredness with something actually behind it.
the patient population at AUBMC is genuinely complex. you see cases that would be rare in a lot of other teaching hospitals, partly because people come from all over the region for specialized care. that’s both exciting and humbling. i saw things during my third year that i had only read about in harrison’s. it makes you a better test taker but more than that it changes how you think through a differential because you stop dismissing the less common options.
the Operating Room time piece is real and it depends so much on how visible you make yourself to the chief resident. if you show up knowing the anatomy, knowing the procedure, having done your homework the night before, they notice. if you show up and can’t answer basic questions you will be sidelined fast. surgery is the rotation where effort is most immediately rewarded and most immediately punished.
psychiatry rotation was the one that surprised me most. i went in thinking it would be less intense than the other services and left thinking it might be the hardest thing i did in my clinical years, just in a completely different way. sitting with patients who are in real distress, trying to build enough trust in a short time to actually understand what’s going on, that’s a skill set nobody teaches you explicitly. you just have to do it and reflect on what worked and what didn’t.