Our Intensive Clerkship in Emergency Medicine

Our Emergency Medicine clerkship is a four-week senior elective that is structured to provide medical students with an intense clinical experience in one of the busiest emergency departments and trauma centers in the United States. Students are supervised by our outstanding Emergency Medicine residents and faculty as they rotate through five different clinical areas within our large county ED. Students are expected to function at the level of a sub-intern. For guidance throughout this process, students will be paired with a senior Emergency Medicine resident and will work that resident’s shift schedule.

In addition to the outstanding clinical experience, we provide a robust didactic curriculum. This includes multiple small group/case based sessions and our weekly Emergency Medicine Grand Rounds, which frequently feature nationally recognized speakers.

Furthermore, those students who are considering emergency medicine as a specialty will receive additional mentorship and advising while on rotation with us. Each student will be offered individualized advising from our medical education team and be assigned a faculty advisor that they will work at least one shift with. All rotators are also invited to our program’s monthly advising social – a high yield, yet laid back event attended by our residency office and multiple residents.

Clerkship Rotations

All rotations are 4 weeks long.

Due to the nature of our rotation, we cannot accommodate alternative start dates or different rotation lengths.

Please note that our Emergency Medicine rotation is highly popular and commonly fills far in advance. We encourage interested applicants to apply as early as possible to their preferred start dates.

Between July and October, we generally only accept students who will be applying to Emergency Medicine for Residency.

Start dates for the 2025-2026 academic year are:

June 30, 2025

July 28, 2025

August 25, 2025

September 22, 2025

October 20, 2025

November 3, 2025

January 5, 2026

February 2, 2026

Application For Rotation

All students who wish to rotate must satisfy the following:

U.S. Applicants:

  1. Apply to the Keck School of Medicine of USC Student Affairs using the AAMC Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) program.
    • We will begin accepting applications on March 4th, 2024 with our first round of invites sent in early April.
  2. Students who wish to rotate during our visiting student sub-I season (start dates 6/30, 7/28, 8/25, 9/22) must also complete the following online application in order to be considered for the rotation: Online Application 

Unfortunately, we are unable to accommodate international students.

Clerkship Contacts

Clerkship Director and Director of Undergraduate Medical Education

Ignacio Calles, MD

Clerkship Coordinator

Hiralda Godoy