To help you prepare for your new clinical responsibilities, all M2 students will start the year with FCC Launch Week, a week of clinically-driven content designed to better prepare students for success in their clerkships. During this pivotal week, you’ll enhance your practical clinical skills around the interface of laboratory-based medicine with patient care.
Clerkships
Your second year consists of six core clerkships, each lasting between four to eight weeks. From surgery to psychiatry and everywhere in between, these intensive clinical experiences introduce you to the broad range of medical care and help you identify where your specialty interests might lie.
Personalized Education through Master Clinical Teachers
Through the Master Clinical Teachers program, second-year medical students receive individualized time with expert clinicians every two to three weeks within each clinical rotation. MCTs will observe you work with a patient from start to finish, then provide you with immediate feedback on everything from accurate diagnosis to your professionalism. You’ll get a chance to ask questions, too. Share with your MCT what’s most difficult for you—anything from the history exam to hearing heart murmurs—and they’ll give you on-the-spot guidance in that area.
Foundations of Physician Responsibility
Foundations of Physician Responsibility 2 (FPR2) builds on concepts introduced in your first year, carrying forward the four core responsibilities—Patient Care, Self Development, Team Collaboration, Systems Engagement—and integrating threads of Healthcare for All and Biomedical & Health Informatics—into the Foundations of Clinical Care (FCC) phase. Through a combination of interactive small group learning, didactic sessions, Center for Experiential Learning and Assessment (CELA) simulations, and in-depth discussion with your College Mentor, FPR 2 helps students relate their clinical clerkship experiences to these key concepts.
Research: “Discovery” Course
The second milestone on the research path takes a deep dive into the resources and community of the top-tier research campus surrounding you. In Year 2’s Discovery course, you’ll explore the amazing variety of research going on at Vanderbilt, meet with potential research mentors, and select a research project that best fits your own interests.
Most medical students select a project from one of the four following areas:
- Bench2Bedside (B2B): From traditional lab research to translational cell culture investigations, B2B research takes you on an unforgettable journey into lab-based biomedical research. If drug development, computational research, or first-in-human studies spark your interest, B2B could be right for you.
- Community and Global Health: If you’re passionate about improving population health, consider a research project in community and global health. From barriers to treatment for underserved populations in America to transnational health issues, community and global health research is all about addressing the health care needs of specific populations, both here in Nashville and around the world.
- Epidemiology and Informatics: A cornerstone of public health, epidemiology research informs policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive health care. Meanwhile, biomedical informatics helps clinicians store, retrieve, and analyze data to improve the quality of care for patients on an everyday basis. If strengthening evidence-based practice or bolstering public health appeals to you, this research area might be the right fit for you.
- Ethics, Education, Policy, and Society (E2PS): Want to dive into the ethical and social dimensions of medicine? The E2PS research area encompasses historical inquiry of medicine, patient accounts of illness, legal aspects of health policy, ethics of genomics, and so much more. The medical humanities come to the forefront here, as biomedical research connects with philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and law.
Think you might be interested in longer-term research? Check out our Medical Scholars Program, which gives you full funding to turn your selected project into a year of uninterrupted biomedical research.
Success in Year 2
Clerkships are foundational to everything else you’ll learn in clinic afterwards, so a competency-based assessment system allows you to see exactly where your strengths and areas for growth lie.
Throughout your M2 year, you’ll get a sense of how you’re doing through:
- Milestone-based assessments from residents and attending faculty
- Narrative feedback from your peers and clinical teams
- Clerkship shelf exams at the end of each clerkship
- End of the Year OSCE event at the end of M2: At this week-long event, you’ll be exposed to clinical scenarios in CELA touching on Vital Experiences and representing your experiential learning from all of the clerkships. Carefully simulated with standardized patients, you’ll receive immediate feedback from faculty evaluating your performance and capabilities. This event is just one step in preparing you to move into the Immersion Phase, helping you identify your clinical strengths and areas for growth.
Throughout it all, your portfolio coach will be there to walk with you through feedback from various sources and set timely goals for personal growth.