An Innovative Curriculum

  • Earlier Clinical Training – Our students enter the clerkship curriculum (Year 3 and Year 4) earlier than students at most other medical schools. This important difference allows our students to gain a greater amount of clinical exposure before they choose their year 4 curriculum and before they begin to focus their interests in the area of medicine they wish to pursue in residency.
  • Continuity of Patient/Physician Relationships – Our Longitudinal Patient Care course ensures that all students follow a cohort of patients across years 3 and 4 to provide important training and relationship building with patients.
  • Personalized Active Learning (PAL) block – Our PAL block allows students to select from a broad set of enrichment experiences designed to further explore possible clinical and basic science interests.
  • Scholarly Project Year 1-4 – During the Scholarly Project course, which spans the entire four years of study, students learn about medical information literacy, life-long learning, teamwork, effective communication, research methods, evidence-based medicine approaches and ethics related to scholarly inquiry. Each of these topics will be explored in depth as the student completes an individual hypothesis-driven research project over the course of this four-year experience.
  • Customizable Scheduling – Many of the curricular components allow the student to customize their specific schedule, such as Scholarly Project, PAL Block, Capstones, and 3rd and 4th year Electives.

Curricular Progression

Evidence-based Teaching Methods

  • Small group, Case-Based Instruction (CBI).
  • Cadaveric dissection laboratories.
  • BioPac medical physiology laboratories.
  • Patient panels.
  • Clinical case mysteries – small group presentations.
  • Team-based learning.
  • Independent Learning Modules.
  • Flipped classroom methodologies.