Year 3: The Clerkship Year
 In the third year, students work with faculty members in metropolitan centers, working-class neighborhoods, suburbs, inner city areas, and rural communities.
This year — which starts with Intersession I – Transition to the Clinical Years — is devoted to required clinical clerkships in medicine, family medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, and surgery. Regardless of where the clerkships take place, all embody the following principles:
- Common curricular objectives at all clinical sites – Students receive comparable experiences on their clinical rotations
- Ambulatory-care requirement – Students spend a minimum of 30 percent of their clinical time in expanded ambulatory-care experiences on the six basic clerkships. These experiences include patient encounters in office practice sites, clinics, outpatient
- Interdisciplinary teaching – Each clerkship incorporates the concept of interdisciplinary teaching by facilitating interaction with representatives of other departments or service areas
- Basic science integration – Each clerkship integrates the teaching of basic sciences into clinical material
Each clerkship location has an associate director on site who works closely with a clerkship director at Drexel University College of Medicine to ensure that the principles are all being met and that students at all clinical sites are receiving a comparable educational experience. Clinical faculty participating in the clerkships, as well as clerkship directors at Drexel University College of Medicine, are available for student assistance and counseling. Each clinical department maintains an active faculty group for ongoing curriculum review and revision. Our faculty members have frequent contact with third- and fourth-year students and visit the various clinical sites regularly.
Students in their clinical years log their patient and procedure experiences into a PDA or Web-enabled cell phone (which is required of all third- and fourth-year students) for frequent review by Drexel University College of Medicine faculty.
All third year clerkships take place in Drexel's academic campuses. Assignments for third year are based on the results of a lottery system, although students can elect year-long assigments at two of our sites: Monmouth Medical Center and Saint Peter's University Hospital.
Learn more about the clerkships.
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