Anyone else feel like they got "shafted" in clinicals?

If your clinicals pair you up with somebody else, then yeah, the girls tend to want to pair with girls so with an odd number, you're it. And L&D is the classic male-unfriendly environment, so my perspective is whatever it took to get through it and finish was fine with me. At this stage, we are all on our own, and I have had my share of the interesting patients which is cool. Sometimes it does sorta suck being a guy in a mostly female environment, but other times its fairly cool...:cool:

I was probably spoiled with my group, but I was also odd-man out. OTOH, for OB my partner was a mother of two, long-term HC worker, like me, with a very dry sense of humor. Her attitude was, "Its a baby. We're not in high-risk. I have noooo desire to see someone else's hoo-ha."

We saw our two live births w/in 10 minutes of start of shift, and said, great, we're done, let's go get a Coke & do paperwork.

Age and experience makes a difference in your co-worker group, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

first off...do you really want to do maternity? Females flock to that job for a reason, ya you missed on an experience, but go to youtube.com and enjoy the wonders of life that way.

As the only guy in my clinical in my ped's rotation I just got teenagers, which worked out since the floor was dead and someone donated an xbox 360 to the floor. Yes, I spent my entire ped's clinical playing xbox for 12 hours.

The girls took care of the babies but other than changing diapers they did nothing else. 80% of the floor was discharged by noon and in the end I was the only one left with something to do.

I remember L&D clinicals. The instructor refused to give me an assignment and i was not allowed to leave the break room till the end of the clinical day. unfair, of course, but i have no interest in working in L&D. then again at that time i had no interest in working in peds... been there for 10 years now.

I saw one lady partsl birth and I am good for life! I spent the rest of the clinical just trying to learn from the OBGYNs, the CNMs, and the CRNAs.

first off...do you really want to do maternity? ...

Why would that matter?

As students we should all have equal exposure to learning experiences. Men & women take the same boards and are responsible for having the same body of knowledge.

I had the identical clinical experience to everybody else, and as a consumer paying for that clinical education, they had better not have discriminated against me.

That's weird. I try to pick male partners in clinical, assuming they'll be better lifters... esp in med-surg where half the pts are obese!

I was left standing in the hall way while my female classmates were allowed to witness a lady partsl birth. BUT, i had a great instructor who noticed that a C-section was about to be done, and she nearly knocked the OBGYN over when she told his she had a male student that needed to observe. 5 minutes later I was scrubbing up, and was the only one in my clinical group to see either A) a c-section, or B) a surgery of any kind.

As the baby was delivered, I assisted the nurse doing the initial new born assessment, and was able to ask her questions that I'm sure a lot of my classmates didn't get to ask.

Sometimes it really does come down to who your teacher is.

Why can't a Guy witness birth ....makes no sense if that happened to me my trade better be unaffected was on omitted from your grade because if it was I wouldn't complain

I don't feel like clinicals are particularly educational, but it's the luck of the draw on the acuity of the patient and the given hands on stuff you get to do with them.

When it came to signing up in the fall, I signed up for a different group that will be 8 people, 4 of which are guys so I won't get screwed like this again.

Won't matter in OB. None of the males in my class saw any births. No moms wanted any male students anywhere near them. I rarely run into patients being skeeved about my gender but that was one area they were.

I was lucky to get ONE mom/baby in my clinical rotation. C-section from a few hours before. It was great, the mom was totally cooperative and I did all of her and the baby's cares.

But that was it. Otherwise I was stuck doing nothing in the special care nursery.