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All Clerkships observe Juneteenth, Thanksgiving Break and Intersession. All 3rd Year students also have one additional vacation week.
- Thanksgiving Break begins at noon the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, with students returning to their clinical duties on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
- Intersession begins after responsibilities (including assigned evening shift) on the final day of the semester, with students returning to their clinical duties on the first weekday after January 1st (Unless January 1st is on Sunday, in which case January 2nd is an observed holiday).
- Vacation weeks not otherwise noted above begin at 5pm Friday (or after assigned evening shift responsibilities), with students returning to their clinical duties on the Monday after break.
Emergency Medicine Selective
Students typically work morning, evening or overnight shifts. There are occasional weekend shifts. Students may trade shifts if their schedules allow them to do this without breaching work-hour or time-off between shifts limitations.
Family Medicine Clerkship
Students typically do not have clinical duties on the weekends; however some sites schedule students for an occasional weekend or evening clinical session (a clinical session is approximately 3.5-4 hours of scheduled patient care) based on the hours that the site is open for patient care (which you can check on your sites webpage linked from the FM clerkship website). When evening or weekend clinical sessions occurs, students will get time compensated back during the week, for an average of two clinical sessions per weekday, not including didactic days or any holidays that fall during the week. Most clinics will run longer than the scheduled patient hours, so you should anticipate approximately an extra hour of time after the scheduled clinical session ends. Your clinical schedule will be given to you when you arrive at your clinical site.
Geriatric Clerkship
The students’ schedules are Monday through Friday, with no nights and no weekends. Students are scheduled for one session a day of 4-6 hours and are typically finished by 4 pm.
Medicine Clerkship
For the weekends that students work, students will observe the same weekdays on and off as the Internal Medicine residents in order to maintain the integrity of the Medicine ward team, and for students to gain experience functioning on an inter-professional team. Also related to this, students will work some Monday Holidays. Students will have 2 4-week blocks on this clerkship. The students have a wellness afternoon the 4th Friday afternoon starting at noon (or after rounds).
Neurology Clerkship
There is no overnight call at any site. Students will be scheduled for no more than 1 weekend of the block during the first 3 weeks of the block.
Ob/Gyn Clerkship
Students on the Ob/Gyn rotation will all rotate through inpatient gynecology, labor and delivery, and ambulatory clinics at all sites (BMC/Lahey students will do their inpatient gynecology only at Lahey). These rotating sites of care allow some schedule flexibility and personalization. Schedules at all sites have enough flexibility that, if requested, students are able to get any specific weekend off and if needed, use one of their personal days to extend to Friday or Monday. Time off should be requested as per the school’s Time Off and Personal Days Policies. Offsite students make their schedules after arriving to the clerkship.
Pediatric Clerkship
For holidays other than Thanksgiving and Intersession, student schedules are site and location dependent. Other holidays (e.g., Monday holidays) and the associated weekends will depend upon the individual student’s schedule and where they are on their rotation, as some outpatient clinics may be closed, but inpatient services active. For the sake of fairness, we do our best to balance schedules to ensure students have schedules that are roughly equal in terms of service time over the course of the block.
Weekends & Shift Work: Most sites have occasional weekend shifts. This includes scheduled weekend coverage on the wards or weekend shifts in the Emergency Department. Students may trade their weekend ward shifts with other medical students on their ward team if need be due to schedule conflicts. Similarly, students may trade ED shifts if their schedules allow them to do this without breaching work-hour or time-off between shifts limitations. Students may not trade assigned primary care clinics without permission. Students may trade subspecialty sessions if there are no schedule conflicts, but must notify the attending they are to work with.
Evening and Overnight Responsibilities:
- Wards: BMC wards has day shift and evening shift schedules. Shifts transition at 3pm. There is no “call” on the pediatrics rotation. Other sites may have longer days to facilitate doing patient admissions – sometimes referred to colloquially as “call.” In rare circumstances, students at BMC may have night shifts on the wards.
- Emergency Department: In the ED student shifts are either morning or evening. Students will frequently have weekend shifts in the ED.
- Ambulatory Clinic: In the ambulatory clinic students may be assigned to clinics in any of the three sessions: 8am-12pm, 1-5:30pm, or 5-8:30pm. The evening clinics are scheduled to “end” at 8:30pm, but typically run until 9pm. Students may have weekend clinical time on the ambulatory rotation consisting of cross-cover in the ED or weekend urgent care sessions.
- Nursery: There are no evening responsibilities in the nursery and rare weekend responsibilities.
Psychiatry Clerkship
For holidays other than Memorial Day, Juneteenth, 4th of July, Labor Day, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Thanksgiving, Intersession, MLK Day and Presidents’ Day, student schedules are site and location dependent. Other holidays (e.g., Monday holidays) and the associated weekends will depend upon the individual student’s schedule and where they are on their rotation as some outpatient clinics may be closed, but inpatient services active. For the sake of fairness, we do our best to balance schedules to ensure students have schedules that are roughly equal in terms of service time over the course of the block.
Radiology Selective
There is no overnight call or weekend responsibilities.
Surgery Clerkship
Students can generally expect to work an average of two weekend days per month, some of which will be overnight shifts seeing acute care surgery and trauma patients in the ER. There is generally flexibility in the weekend schedule so that students can plan to be away for major events as needed.
