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Wrong question. Almost no college names a rotation you must not do; several name ones you must — RACP wants at least 20 weeks of medicine 1, ANZCA wants 104 weeks of prevocational training with no more than 52 in anaesthesia or ICU 2. Cover the prerequisites, then pick terms that produce a consultant who will vouch for you.
The only rotations that are genuinely load-bearing are the prerequisites. RACP asks for at least 20 weeks of medical experience plus director-of-prevocational-education approval before basic training 1. ANZCA asks for two years of general hospital experience of which at most 12 months may be anaesthesia or ICU — an explicit cap, not a target 2. Several RACS specialties require their terms at PGY3 or above, which means a keen PGY1 term in that specialty does not buy what people think it buys 3. Everything outside that list is a preference, not a gate.
The second thing that matters is who signs your reference. NSW asks for two referees with at least one current or recent supervisor 4; Queensland requires two referee reports with a maximum of one from a registrar 5. A term where no consultant ever sees you work is worse for your application than a term in a specialty you don't care about, because it produces nothing you can use. The sub's practical version of this is to get medical terms early if you want a physician reference, because surgical terms make consultant references hard 6.
What the sub actually names. Ortho leads every "worst rotation" thread in the corpus, repeatedly, over four years — a lot of ward work, little medical support, and a hierarchy people describe as unpleasant 67. Rehab draws the same complaint from a different angle: clerical volume with little medicine 6.
The counter-argument, which is the more upvoted one. People get onto BPT with two surgical intern terms; the term you didn't want turns out useful; and a rotation you hated still teaches you how the hospital works 6. "Avoid" advice ages badly because it is really advice about one unit and one head of department in one year.
No health service publishes term-by-term satisfaction or reference outcomes. Both are not published.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
From my own experiences, Ortho. A lot of work, no medical support and often under appreciated on the term.
Every rotation is a great learning opportunity. I got slotted in to do 5 weeks of psychiatry as an intern ...which I didn't want. But that term has proved so useful.
I got onto BPT having done 2 surgical rotations during internship. I chose that because I wanted the sweet sweet overtime money.
Unless you want to do it as a specialty, I wouldn't recommend rehab.
Asked 19 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in the r/ausjdocs dump (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /rotation.{0,35}(avoid|worst|best|pick|choose|which)|(avoid|worst|best|which|choose).{0,30}rotation|term.{0,25}(pick|choose|preferenc)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the term-preferencing threads, chosen so the two most-named 'avoid' terms sit beside the 'every rotation is useful' rebuttal.