Away Rotations: Sam Sayed, MS4, Shares Experiences at Stanford and Mayo Clinic

FORT WORTH –  Fourth-year medical students typically do away rotations at North American health care systems in a medical specialty they’re interested in to prepare them for residency programs.

“Our students have skills that are exportable outside of their local rotations,” JoAnna Leuck, M.D., Associate Dean of Educational Affairs at the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University said. “We often get feedback that our students are advanced beyond their level of training, especially around how they communicate with their patients.”

The away rotations are two- to four-week programs where medical students can “audition” for a Graduate Medical Education (GME) residency positions at a hospital or health care center. Even though away rotations are not required to apply to a residency program, it allows medical students an opportunity to impress potential residency directors and stand out from other candidates.

Throughout the year, we’ll showcase away rotation experiences from some of our Burnett School of Medicine at TCU students.

Sam Sayed

Hometown: Arlington, Texas

Classification: MS-4

Medical Specialty: Emergency Medicine

Away Rotations: Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Stanford Health Care – Palo Alto

As Sam Sayed, MS-4, Burnett School of Medicine at TCU, headed off to away rotations at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and Stanford Health Care in Palo Alto, California, this past summer he felt prepared.

“This medical school has been a dream come true for me,” Sayed said. “Over the course of my career here, I had a two-and-a-half-year head start over traditional medical students.”

Sayed and his classmates began seeing patients during their first year of medical school in the Burnett School of Medicine’s Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) curriculum for 21 weeks. As second-year medical students, they had 10 weeks of inpatient hospital immersions and 40 weeks of clinical ambulatory rotations in eight medical specialties: Emergency Medicine, Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Neurology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Surgery.

During that period, Sayed became drawn to emergency medicine and grew more comfortable talking to patients. He credited the medical school’s LIC for giving him an edge when he was asked to get critical information from trauma patients on his rotations.

“When I was on my aways it allowed me to blossom at a critical point in my career,” Sayed said.