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) 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 California.