It depends which field of ortho you're doing your AI in, as UPitt is pretty compartmentalized. I did sports med, and I think my experience was pretty different from the students doing trauma.

For sports med, you get assigned to an attending, and shadow him/her in clinic 2-3 days/week at the UPMC Sports Med Center, and go to the ORs at the nearby hospital 2 days/week. Both are on the South Side, but you're expected to be at trauma conference every day at 6:30 am (inc. Saturdays) and that's at UPMC on the North Side.

You have to find your own housing, I did so by mass e-mail to the entire UPitt med school. I lived near UPMC and it worked out well, as you can always get a ride with one of the residents to the Sports Med Center and your overnight call will be at UPMC. As for call. you and the other students make your own call schedule, with the condition that there must be one student on call per night. When I was there there were seven students or so, so I did 4-5 call nights. Call is pretty rough, I was up all night all nights but one.

Thanks, thats really helpful. Do you know
at all how the Trauma service is different, do they get any clinic exposure, or cover inhouse
ortho service..

I don't know anything about the trauma service except that they are located only at UPMC, which is handy, as you get to avoid travelling to the south side.

The trauma service is divided into three services. You're assigned to one of them. Depending on which one you're assigned to, you may be busy or not so much. Two services are busier than the third. You will take call along with the other students; you essentially make up your own schedule with the other students on at the time so that there's a student on every night, unless of course you're the only student on ortho that month in which case, umm, I'm not sure how often you'd be expected to take call.

Like any other ortho rotation, know your anatomy.

The morning after you take call, you'll likely present one or more cases from the night before and get pimped on them. You'll be asked things like fracture classifications, anatomy, how to treat the fracture and why you would choose that method, etc . . . again it depends on who is asking the questions. Usually the trauma attendings are there as well as Dr. Fu, the chair.

I had a question concerning the program at UPitt because I had looked seriously into doing an externship there. Several of my attendings have recently voiced concern when discussing the program. They stated that they are having several problems in the department and strongly recommended that I look elsewhere for externship. As anyone heard similar comments recently or could possibly clarify the situation?

thanks