The IM Bootcamp
The step from the last day of medical school to the first day of internship is the sharpest increase in responsibility in a physician’s career, and it happens overnight. This is the curriculum for that step: a free, program-agnostic three-day intensive for incoming internal-medicine interns — US MDs, DOs, and international graduates alike — run in late June or early July, designed for adaptation by any US internal-medicine residency.
A prerequisites block, then three days of case-based sessions, then a weeks-2–8 curriculum — plus the assessment spine and the transition series, all in stable small groups of six to eight. Every session is built the same way: a realistic case or concrete problem put in front of the room first, decisions committed out loud before consequences are revealed, and the named framework — SBAR, I-PASS, SPIKES — taught only after it has rescued someone. Day 1 keeps patients safe. Day 2 teaches the conversations no textbook does. Day 3 teaches the machine you work inside — and the weeks that follow play the long game.
Prerequisites — Before the first case
Run before the intensive or as its opening block: the room’s safety, the program’s own rules, the EMR, and the map of the services — the local ground every later session stands on.
| # | Session | Led by | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Welcome, ground rules, and what you’re actually afraid of | Program director + chiefs | 45 min | Live → |
| 02 | Schedules, Backup, and Leave: the program machinery to ask about | Chiefs + program coordinator | 45 min | Live → |
| 03 | The EMR, From an Expert User: inpatient and outpatient efficiency | Expert users + informatics | 2 × 75 min | Live → |
| 04 | The Rotation Map: expectations and tips for every service | Seniors per service | Half day | Live → |
| 05 | Protecting Yourself and Your Patients: isolation, sharps, and exposures | Infection prevention + employee health | 45 min | Live → |
| 06 | The Chart Is a Legal Document: privacy and digital professionalism | Informatics + compliance guest | 45 min | Live → |
| 07 | When the Learning Environment Is the Problem: mistreatment and reporting | Program director + GME leadership | 45 min | Live → |
Day 1 — Surviving the wards
The clinical and logistical skills that keep patients safe and interns sane in the first ninety days.
| # | Session | Led by | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 08 | Owning Your Day: time management and inbox triage | Chief resident | 75 min | Live → |
| 09 | The 2 a.m. Page: cross-cover survival | Senior resident | 90 min | Live → |
| 10 | Your First Admission: workflow and prioritization | Chief resident | 75 min | Live → |
| 11 | Medication Safety: high-alert drugs, reconciliation, and the pharmacist | Faculty + clinical pharmacist | 75 min | Live → |
| 12 | Rapid Response: the first five minutes | Faculty | 75 min | Live → |
| 13 | Surviving the ICU: your first unit month | ICU faculty + a senior | 75 min | Live → |
| 14 | Handoffs That Don’t Drop Patients: I-PASS | Senior resident | 60 min | Live → |
| 15 | Night Float, Sleep, and the Drive Home | Senior resident | 45 min | Live → |
Day 2 — Patients, families, and teams
The conversations and conflicts no textbook teaches, led by the people with the scars to prove it.
| # | Session | Led by | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | The 3 a.m. Pushback: conflict and collaboration with nursing | Senior resident | 75 min | Live → |
| 17 | The Interpreter Is the Instrument: language access, practiced | Faculty + interpreter services | 60 min | Live → |
| 18 | “Is It Cancer?”: delivering serious news | Faculty — palliative care | 90 min | Live → |
| 19 | Code Status Is Not Goals of Care: the conversations, untangled | Faculty — palliative care | 75 min | Live → |
| 20 | The Angry Family: de-escalation at 7 p.m. | Faculty | 75 min | Live → |
| 21 | I Made a Mistake: error, disclosure, and the second victim | Faculty | 75 min | Live → |
| 22 | The Struggling Colleague: approach, resources, duty to report | Chief resident | 50 min | Live → |
| 23 | Calling Consults and the 3 a.m. Attending Call | Senior resident | 50 min | Live → |
Day 3 — The systems you work inside — and a sustainable you
The hospital machine, the clinic machine, the hands-on stations — and the personal plan that makes the year survivable.
| # | Session | Led by | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 | The Hospital Machine: levels of care, discharge, codes, and death | Chief resident + faculty | 90 min | Live → |
| 25 | The Discharge Is a Procedure: safe transitions and pending results | Faculty + case management | 75 min | Live → |
| 26 | The Clinic Is a Different Country: the outpatient transition | Clinic faculty + a senior | 60 min | Live → |
| 27 | “Why Won’t It Let Me Order This?”: coding, prior auth, and the insurance maze | Faculty — clinic preceptor | 75 min | Live → |
| 28 | The Procedure Lab: orient, demonstrate, practice — and POCUS | Proceduralists + seniors, faculty supervising | 2 hours | Live → |
| 29 | The Data Stations: ECG, chest film, blood gas, chemistries, telemetry | Chiefs + faculty per station | 2.5 hours | Live → |
| 30 | The Sustainable Intern: burnout, motivation, and your plan | Chief resident + PD | 60 min | Live → |
Weeks 2–8 — The extended curriculum
Boards, money, scholarship, careers, culture, and the localization shells — dripped through the first two months, when each becomes real.
Survival series — The clinical hours
One conference hour a week through the first two months — the clinical content the three days deliberately leave out, taught by faculty from current references, aimed where interns say the floor sags.
| # | Session | Led by | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 41 | Acid–Base and the Blood Gas: the stepwise read, the common patterns, and the edge cases | Faculty — nephrology, pulmonary, or general IM | 60 min | Live → |
| 42 | Fluids and Electrolytes: correcting it right for the setting | Faculty + clinical pharmacist | 60 min | Live → |
| 43 | Glycemic Emergencies: DKA, euglycemic DKA, HHS — and hypoglycemia | Faculty — endocrinology or hospital medicine | 60 min | Live → |
| 44 | The Ten Conditions That Fill the Medical ICU | ICU faculty | 60 min | Live → |
| 45 | The Ten Conditions That Fill the Wards | Hospital-medicine faculty | 60 min | Live → |
| 46 | The Clinic Panel, Part 1: the ten chronic conditions | Clinic faculty — general IM | 60 min | Live → |
| 47 | The Clinic Panel, Part 2: mental health, infections, and what nobody refers out | Clinic faculty + behavioral health | 60 min | Live → |
Reminders — The rest of the year
After the intensive ends, the forgetting begins — one retrieval-first half hour a month, each booster timed to the month that makes its material real again, plus three that fire on events instead of dates.
| # | Session | Led by | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 48 | The Monthly Reminders: booster cases through intern year | Chief residents | Series — 30 min monthly | Live → |
Assessment — How you’re measured
The assessment spine made concrete: the day-zero OSCE sample and the machinery explained.
| # | Session | Led by | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 49 | The Milestone OSCE: eight formative stations, mapped to the competency domains | Faculty examiners + standardized patients | ~2 hrs/group | Live → |
| 50 | Milestones, the CCC, and Your ILP: how you are actually assessed | Program director or APD | 45 min | Live → |
| 51 | The Professionalism Agreement: what it typically contains, and why | Program director | 45 min | Live → |
Transitions — The job changes twice
Run each in the spring before the turn: the senior transition, and the third year that is not a repeat.
| # | Session | Led by | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 52 | Becoming the Senior: the PGY-2 transition | Current seniors + chiefs | 75 min | Live → |
| 53 | The PGY-3 Year: not a repeat — leading, finishing, leaving well | Chiefs + recent graduates | 75 min | Live → |
How it’s built.
Design commitments- Cases before content — every session opens inside a situation or a concrete problem, never with a lecture
- Progressive disclosure — interns commit to decisions before the consequences are revealed
- The right messenger — seniors and chiefs teach survival; faculty teach the high-stakes rooms
- Stable groups of 6–8 all three days; facilitators rotate, the group’s trust does not
- Psychological safety as infrastructure — set on the first morning, enforced in every room
- Everything localizable — phone numbers, order sets, and policies are marked slots, never assumptions
Running it at your program.
For program leadershipThe bootcamp scales from fifteen to forty interns. All sessions run in parallel small groups — a cohort of twenty-four needs three breakout rooms and, across the three days, roughly four senior residents, three chiefs, and six to eight faculty, each leading the sessions where their voice carries most. Recruit six weeks out; every facilitator reads their session twice and does a twenty-minute dry run.
The hardest logistics item is also the one that makes everything else possible: clinical coverage, so that interns sit in these rooms with silent pagers. Hardest emotional content sits mid-day, never last; no case-based session runs past ninety minutes — the hands-on circuits are the deliberate exceptions; food is real, because food is a message.
The shared facilitation method — the debrief structure, the ground rules, what to do when a case surfaces someone’s real life — is carried inside each session’s own running-the-room plan; scheduling, staffing, and evaluation stay with the program running it.
For the interns themselves, ACP’s IMpower series pairs well with this curriculum — starting with its PGY-1 guide, Start Residency Strong ↗ (ACP login may be required; residents join at reduced rates) — and the transition sessions below link its PGY-2 and PGY-3 companions.
If you direct or coordinate an internal-medicine program and would like to pilot a session, or if you are an intern who wishes a specific session existed, say so — that is how this gets built in the right order.
Beyond the three days.
The division of laborThe intensive, the extended curriculum, and the monthly reminder series are built — the reminders carry the material through the rest of intern year, one retrieval-first half hour a month, plus boosters that fire on events: the first ICU block, the first death, the February wall.
What this site deliberately does not write: your program’s operating manual. How the sessions are scheduled and staffed, how facilitators are chosen and coached, and how the bootcamp is evaluated and improved are decisions that belong to the program running it — they depend on your calendar, your people, and your GME machinery. The curriculum carries everything that generalizes: each session’s running-the-room plan, the marked localization slots, and the design principles in the introduction. The rest is yours by design.