....choose externship patterns where I can utilize family, friends, or extremely cheap housing for the month.
Most of my colleagues spend more money on 1 externship than I did on 6.
I know externs that would travel somewhere, pay 1000 for airBnB, spend 1500+ for a car the rent for the month, and then eat regularly and go to restaurants and events, and the costs are 4k+ for one externship....more than I paid for all mine combined. ...
This is very bad advice. ^^^
There is nothing wrong with saving some money with scholarships, cheaper meals, less frills or travel as a pod student.
However, podiatry externships are
not the time to cheap out.
They are the time to find good training, compare options, and your best chance to create match options.
Getting a good residency is the whole point of going to podiatry school (assuming you obviously pass, pass student boards).
The point of externships is to learn, and anyone with their eyes open knows it's also the main chance to gain good residency match options.
Someone who spends $15k (plus whatever rent or storage unit back in pod school city) to do five top end clerk months is infinitely better off than someone who saved their money by doing average and junk programs since they were in the hometown, pod school area, cheap or free rental housing, etc.
I didn't take it to quite the extreme that some of the other student surgery club officers from my school did (some of them flew to clerk PI, Kaiser, UPMC, Inova, Swedish, DMC, etc top programs). I still did a lot of driving to see 5 top programs in 4 cities from south to north and central to east. In the end, we all got great training and good end results in terms of incomes and satisfaction... ortho group, residency faculty, solo/partner pod office, etc.
It is said on here all the time, but
podiatry residencies are NOT all similar in quality or surgery volume.
That is a huge mistake and dangerous thinking.
Many of our residencies are flat out inadequate (hence ABFAS board pass rates and all the threads you see about nightmare clerkships, residency, and needing to transfer).
...Best of luck to you in the match, but it is not good advice to step over a dollar to save a dime on clerkship travels. That dime will probably end up costing you seven figures over the course of a career - not to mention good chance it'll leave you lacking skills and job options and quality. You will see a bit on match day, and you will know much more around pgy3 job search... and still more years out into the job world. I would doubt you will look back and say you'd have done it all the same.