Transition to Residency

Course Overview

The Transition to Residency course is a two-week long course offered to medical students in their 4th year of the medical program. It is designed to prepare students for some of the patient care and team-based challenges they will face during their first year of residency training. The course is tailored to different specialties (Medical specialties – Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Neurology, Psychiatry, Emergency Medicine; Surgical specialties – Surgery, Obstetrics & Gynecology, ENT, etc.) and provides student-centered experiential learning activities and focuses on teamwork, communication, resuscitation, patient care, clinical reasoning, and procedural skills.

Course content is delivered in multiple ways:

1. Didactic sessions delineate the approach to common patient complaints on the inpatient floor.

2. Simulation of common patient complaints, which upcoming interns will see on the inpatient floor. Students work together on interdisciplinary teams and are expected to recognize and perform the critical action points to stabilize their patient before advanced help arrives.

3. A procedural skills station allows students to practice specialty specific procedures e.g. placement of central lines, performing lumbar punctures, basic resuscitation skills, etc.

Interactive large and small group case- and problem-based learning activities are interspersed between immersive uni-professional simulations to reinforce fundamental interdisciplinary specialty-specific clinical skills.

Students are assessed by faculty rating and by testing their knowledge base with quizzes. This course is graded as pass or fail.


Course Director: Reshma Bholah, MD

Staff Support: ocs@qatar-med.cornell.edu