The Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM) held its annual meeting October 26 through 28, 2006 in New Orleans, with the theme of “Renewal and Revitalization.” Topics included developing appropriate clinical skills, factors influencing teaching effectiveness, enhancing interest in internal medicine, professionalism, recognizing student abuse, and how to incorporate into the clerkship the updated set of goals and objectives developed cooperatively by CDIM and the Society of General Internal Medicine. The CDIM meeting was part of Academic Internal Medicine Week, where educators and administrators involved in student, resident, and fellow education gather for the meetings of their individual organizations as well as for joint sessions of mutual interest. Participants share expertise and develop solutions to common problems. The week's themes included disaster preparedness, teaching patient safety, residents as teachers, improving feedback, and future directions for internal medicine education. Thirty research posters were presented; the following seven abstracts represent those that were chosen by CDIM for oral presentation or as one of the three Best Research Posters. Chheda determined that many clerkships do not explicitly address ethnic and racial disparities, outlined what is covered in the curricula that do exist, and explored barriers to inclusion of this topic. Griffith showed that the reporter-interpreter-manager-educator (RIME) framework of student assessment is effective even without formal group meetings and that housestaff RIME ratings are accurate, perhaps more so than those of attendings. Mintz described efficacy of an innovative intervention to raise student awareness about interacting with representatives of pharmaceutical companies. Walden demonstrated that students who have higher patient care workloads actually perform better on standardized examinations. Denton, in his study of accuracy of student logbook entries, discovered that students tend to underreport clinical exposures, calling into question the validity of this method for student and medical school evaluation. Hoellein demonstrated the effectiveness of using standardized patients to teach students how to address more complex history-taking and counseling issues. Kuzma added to her work on teaching cardiac auscultation, using computer resources to conduct a “virtual classroom.”