The UC Davis sub-I is notoriously hard. I rotated through last year on trauma service, which is probably the roughest of the bunch. Day typically started at 4-4:30am during which time you get labs and update the patient list prior to prerounding at 5:30am with the residents. At 6:00am they run the list for inpatients and then at 6:30 am triage all patients on whom consults were made overnight. Breakfast gets squeezed in the 7-7:30 slot although as the rotator you may have to do without since pre-op scut needs to be done on the 8am cases and you are the go-to guy on that front. The trauma service is pretty busy; there are always at least 2 rooms going and sometimes 3. One med student is typically placed in each OR and if there are more rotators than rooms, the odd guy out can hang with the on-call resident. Each room typically has 3-4 cases a day that run till around 6pm. After the cases are done you usually get the green light to bail but should touch base with the on-call resident to see if there is anything you can do. You probably will spend 2 days of the week in clinic, which is very busy but tends to wrap up around 3pm, after which, again, you touch base with the on-call resident before taking off. The call schedule can range anywhere from q3 to q5 depending on how many rotators are there. UCD has one of the busiest ED's in the country and get more than their share of ortho trauma. This makes call typically a very busy experience and you are lucky if you ever sleep more than a couple hours. There is no such thing as going home post-call so it is wise to work out your schedule with the other AI's so that your post-call days are in the clinic, otherwise you'll be doing cases during the 35th hour of continuous work, which is painful no matter who you are. There is no such thing as a day off so expect to work all 26 days in the rotation, although a chief resident may slip you 1 or 2 at his discretion. The culture is not to ask, which is not unique to this program obviously. If you are not on call weekends can be lighter, especially if there are no urgent trauma cases on the board--you may only need to round in the morning and then make sure the on-call resident and his student have things covered before you cut out to do some reading. By and large, the residents are a pretty nice bunch of guys--they were also the most able in the OR of all the residents from the 3 solid programs at which I rotated, even though they don't have a VA...I wouldn't worry about that here.
-F
