Transitioning between medical school and internship is stressful with newly increased responsibilities. One way to prepare fourth year medical students for residency is through a boot camp course. Boot camps are more frequently cited in the surgical literature as a way to increase the confidence of students entering surgical internship, but may offer similar benefits to students entering an internal medicine internship. With a 5-point Likert -cale survey, we conducted a needs assessment of fourth-year students entering internal medicine internship, interns, and hospitalist attendings. We asked students about their current comfort level in 23 topics encountered in internal medicine. For interns, we asked them to reflect on their comfort level with each topic at entrance into internship. For attendings, we asked them to rate the importance of each topic. Our results showed that over half of current interns indicated feelings of discomfort with a greater number of topics than did students (16 vs. 6). Interestingly, inpatient and outpatient procedures showed very high levels of discomfort by students and interns though were rated as being unimportant by hospitalist faculty. Using data from our needs assessment, we sought to create a curriculum for graduating medical students entering an internal medicine internship that would address their verbalized needs as well as inferred needs defined by faculty responses. Findings that our fourth-year students reported higher comfort level with topics than internal medicine interns reflecting back on their comfort level may be a result of different medical school preparations, response bias, or recall bias
