Overview

During their third and fourth year of podiatric medical training, students are typically required to participate in clinical sciences and patient care judgment. Visit the Podiatric Education section for more information on the curriculum for podiatric medicine programs. Part of this educational is experience is clerkships or clinical rotations.

Clerkships are three to four week rotations (40 hours per week) in a hospital or ambulatory surgery center. Students are observe and participate in basic podiatric procedures as outlined in their clerkship and approved by their college or institution. Clerkships expose students to all facets of podiatric medicine and surgery in the hospital, professional office, and clinical setting. The clerk gains essential experience managing the care of patients and learning the roles and responsibilities of the DPM. They also witness first-hand the DPM’s interaction with other health-care professionals. Clerkship programs must have affiliation agreements in place with a student’s college before hosting a clerk.

Clerkship Timeline

The Clerkship Timeline establishes the deadlines for each podiatric clerkship cycle of program registration, student application and program selection, and offer and acceptance rounds.

• 2025 Clerkship Timeline

The 2025 cycle will schedule clerkships to be served from January 2025 through May 2026.

DPMClerkships

The DPMClerkships website is where programs register, review applications, and rank students for offers. Students use the site to complete their applications and select programs and the months for their clerkships. DPMClerkships schedules clerkships by offer and acceptance between programs and students.

• AACPM DPMClerkships website

Clerkship Handbook of Programs

The Clerkship Handbook is a comprehensive listing of podiatric medicine clerkships and contain detailed content on each clerkship program to aid students in the clerkship application and selection process.

• Clerkship Handbook sortable

The Clerkship Handbook is published at the end of program registration each year. Refer to the above Clerkship Schedule for the date of first publication.

National Clerkship Calendar

National Clerkship Calendars (standardized start and end dates of rotations)

The National Clerkship Calendar is used to standardize the start dates of clerkship rotations across all the podiatric medical colleges.

• 2023-2028 National Clerkship Calendar

Podiatric Medical School Clerkship Contacts

• College Clerkship Coordinators