I am a third year medical student. I recently completed my first ortho rotation at my home institution and received a disappointing 'pass' (i.e. not honors) on my evaluation. Is this as bad as it seems regarding residency applications? I am also concerned about rec letters since my chair apparently was not impressed. Any advice?
For our rotations we can only get honors in our "required" rotations, all others are pass/fail. So how does that look when you get a pass in that rotation, is it explained in the deans letter hopefully or what?
Certainly tough getting the "pass" in an Ortho home rotation, but I've found that programs which interviewed me looked at my entire application en block and didn't bust me on the here-and-there deficiencies. You have great scores and'll probably get great letters despite your home rotation grade... after all, it's about what you learned, not what you "got". As someone else said previously: your matching depends on your ability to not piss people off.
Not sure how it works at your school but at ours you cannot even get Honors on a 3rd year rotation. Bottom line is that your 3rd year rotation is not what matters - your 4th year sub-internship is critical. If you were to only get a "pass" on the 4th year rotation that would be considered a significant red flag in your application.
