3rd Year – Medicine I

Welcome to the Medicine I Clerkship

We look forward to working with you to create an outstanding learning experience that both challenges and supports you.

The Big Goal of the Clerkship is to develop someone who we would want to care for our family members, a highly caring, increasingly independent clinician, who is a strong team member.

Medicine I is an 8-week inpatient-based clerkship that is designed to:
• Introduce you to the world of internal medicine.
• Refine your skills as a self-directed learner.
• Enable you to become a contributing, collaborating team member.
• Develop your skills as a clinician.

The World of Internal Medicine
The discipline of internal medicine provides distinctive perspectives, skills and tools, and patient problems that are valuable to the student planning to enter internal medicine or another specialty. The Medicine I Clerkship will introduce you to this world of internal medicine to help you both improve your clinical skills and make a more informed choice regarding your career path. Many students will choose internal medicine and others will incorporate the skills and perspectives acquired in this clerkship into their careers in other specialties. We welcome all students without regard to your career plans.

For more perspective on a career in Internal Medicine, take a look at this article from the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The Self-Directed Learner
The Medicine I Clerkship builds upon the learner-centered approach and assumes a mature learner who seeks to move toward increasing self-directedness. The dynamic nature of learning while caring for patients requires that students become adept at identifying your learning needs and acting upon them. As a student, you will need to be a flexible learner who employs a variety of appropriate resources ranging from textbooks and the medical literature to consultants. The clerkship provides you with opportunities and encourages you to read deeply, to become the “local expert’ on your patients and to share your learning with your team.

Contributing, Collaborating Team Member
Medicine is a team “game” requiring you to work effectively with multiple health care providers from different disciplines and within a complex system. The Clerkship challenges you to ”find your niche” from which to consistently contribute to both patient care and team learning, and to develop the habits of mind and skill sets that will enable you to function effectively within and improve the systems in which our patients receive their care.

Becoming a Clinician
The primary focus of the clerkship is to increase your capacity to function as a caring, increasingly independent but supervised clinician on a multidisciplinary team. In seeking to achieve this goal, we believe it is helpful to have in mind the essence or ideal of what an internist is, a picture of a person who has achieved a level of mastery in the discipline of internal medicine. We describe this ideal in the Clerkship Vision.