Medicine 1 Clerkship Overview

The Medicine I Clerkship is an eight-week experience designed to enhance the student’s capacity to function as a caring, increasingly independent, but supervised, clinician on a multi-professional team. During the clerkship, students learn clinical medicine while working side-by-side with residents and faculty in providing care to a cohort of inpatients. A key principle that guides student learning is to provide graduated responsibility with supervision. Medicine I introduces the clinical tools and perspectives of the internist that are appropriate regardless of the student’s career choice. This learning experience is complemented by a unique enrichment in which students also work closely in small groups with a clerkship director and hone essential clinical skills (including intermediate-level communications skills, physical diagnosis, and clinical reasoning). The clerkship is divided into two mini-blocks of four weeks each, and students learn at two of the following sites: Boston Medical Center, the West Roxbury VA Hospital, MetroWest Medical Center (Framingham), Beth Israel Deaconess Plymouth, Beth Israel Deaconess Needham, Berkshire Medical Center (Pittsfield, MA), St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center (Brighton) and Roger Williams Medical Center (Providence, RI). In addition, some students will take the entire eight-week clerkship at the Kaiser Health Care System in San Jose, California.