If you want to do an away rotation at Iowa, I would check the website for the department or call the department administrator at 319-356-2595. She can give you information about rotating. I do not think that November is too late.
As for how "top notch" Iowa's program is, I think that depends on what you are interested in. If you plan to be a community practitioner, I think Iowa will prepare you well, as will probably 50 programs in this country. If you want to be an academic, I personally think that it is the best program. There is no question that I am biased, but I made that determination while interviewing before I was biased. I felt that there were about 5 places that had equal academic prestige, but nowhere else had so many factors enhancing education.
Iowa has a unique situation in that it provides the only tertiary referral center for a huge area. Even enormous referral medical centers like Harvard, Hopkins, and Mayo have multiple other competing tertiary hospitals within an hour drive (if not within a 5 minute drive).
That means that Iowa residents see a full schedule of complex cases. There are a lot fewer ankle fractures and hip fractures to fix, but that frees up so much time to do much more complicated and interesting cases. We get plenty of ankle fractures and hip fractures to learn how to fix them, but we do not have to spend much of our rotation time doing that. It allows our faculty to truly be sub-specialists. This, along with the fact that Iowa City is great place to live, is probably why so many of faculty develop such prominence in their respective fields.
Without question, the faculty at Iowa is the most stable of any academic program. The vast majority of them have been at Iowa for their entire careers. Many of them have had and turned down multiple chairmanship opportunities in the past, simply because they like living in Iowa City and like the Departmental environment.
The main reason that I felt it was the best option for an academically directed orthopaedics resident is that the faculty really focus on teaching you how to think about the field and question what's out there in the literature.
I imagine at most academic programs, residents are expected to know the literature's important papers, etc., but at Iowa we are moreso expected to understand what is deficient in even the prominent papers in the literature. We are constantly led by our faculty to question why we do things a certain way and whether or not that is supported by data (as opposed to opinion) available in the literature.
The field of orthopaedics is incredibly dogmatic overall. Take a look at any of our journals and see that most "Studies" are reports on the outcomes of a series of patients treated in one way or another. However, as much as possible the faculty at Iowa try to teach evidence-based practice, which is very challenging in such a field.
One final note, that was important to me. Unlike all the other powerhouse academic orthopaedic programs, we do not have many fellows here. Many programs find ways around letting fellows get too much in the way, but our way is by not having many of them. It certainly simplifies the matter.
