A Long Wait

After many weeks of being put off over and over again, we finally got our final placement letter from the St. Georges University Clinical Department for our clinical rotations. The way it works is they gave us a preliminary placement back in December for St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center in Paterson, NJ. The reason why it was preliminary is because we still had to take Step 1 USMLE exam. Sometimes kids fail that test and are not allowed to move onto clinical rotations. This means the school and hospitals have to make some changes in order to accomodate the change in number of students. The University does their best to keep you on yourpreliminary placement but sometimes they do have to change you. This means that you cannot get a lease on an apartment or make any arrangements at all to move to your new place until you get this final letter confirming your placement. Normally, the school is supposed to give you this final placement 4 weeks in advance from the start date of your orientation at the hospital. SGU is notorious for making mistakes and dragging their feet and they did not disappoint this time either. 9 working days after the deadline to get us our placement they finally sent it. I had explained to them we needed our placement on time because flights were filling up fast and we would have to rent a car if they were late sending our letter because we had to ship our car and it takes two weeks at least to get there. The response I got to my stern email was " it will be there sometime this week." I had heard that from them before, "It will be there in one or two weeks", "It will be there next week", "It will be there late this week or early next week", and so on. Luckily, finally this was the week and we were confirmed to go to St. Joseph's FINALLY!!!! I am relieved and excited but still upset because now we do have to rent a car because SGU was so late getting their act together. Oh well, I will be working at the hospital for the next year and a half, then I will graduate and will no longer need to deal with the school's administration any longer!