The Pritzker School of Medicine, UChicago MD program

The school says its curriculum rests on three principles: active learning, integration among disciplines where possible and appropriate, and a scholarly project for every student. In Phase 1, a Scientific Foundations strand teaches the science, from anatomy to pharmacology, while a Physician Formation strand covers clinical skills, health equity, health policy, ethics, research methods and AIM.

The Phoenix Curriculum trimmed overlap to make room for earlier clinical time. The old Cell Pathology and Immunology course and the Microbiology course, for example, became one Host, Defense and Invasion course taught by both instructors. Planners also added more team-based learning in small groups after finding that passive lectures engaged students less. An optional Pritzker Morning Report, modeled on the morning case conferences of residency, lets you work through a real case.

From Phase 2 you learn mainly by working on clinical teams in hospitals and clinics. Phase 3 shifts toward preparing for internship, the first year of residency.

In Phase 1, lectures are usually recorded, and attending them live is recommended but generally not required. Small groups and labs are different: you must attend at least 85 percent of each course's required sessions. Every clinical encounter, with standardized or real patients, is compulsory, and missing a summative exam without approval counts as a failed attempt.

Clerkships expect you every day, with attendance of at least 95 percent: you may miss at most one day of a four-week clerkship and two days of a six- or eight-week one. Duty hours are capped at 80 a week, averaged over four weeks, with eight hours off between shifts and, on average, one day in seven free. When on call, third-year students should be sent home by midnight.

Anatomy comes first. The Human Body, the opening course of the Scientific Foundations strand, follows Immersion Week at the start of year 1 and covers histology, the study of tissues under the microscope, and gross anatomy. You have large- and small-group teaching every day and dissect human cadavers, with sessions on physical examination, surgical approaches and radiologic imaging that tie the anatomy to clinical practice.

The school's technical standards require every student to take part in dissecting cadavers and in anatomy, pathology and neuroanatomy lab work. Practical exams use cadaveric specimens, and any retake must be done before December 1 of year 1. Neuroanatomy returns in Brain and Behavior in the spring.

In Immersion Week you first meet standardized patients and learn to take a history and approach a clinical encounter. Clinical Skills and Reasoning (CSR) then runs through Phase 1, building communication, examination and clinical reasoning skills with standardized and real patients.

From January of year 1, AIM rotates a weekly half-day through four settings. One is an outpatient clinic such as primary care, family medicine or geriatrics. Another is interprofessional care, for example with physical or occupational therapists or a registered dietitian. The others are CSR workshops or OSCEs, and inpatient sessions where a faculty preceptor watches you assess and present a patient, then gives feedback.

Phase 1 is pass/fail and competency-based: you pass by reaching set standards, not by outscoring classmates. Course grades draw on in-house exams and quizzes, clinical performance checklists from standardized and real patient encounters, review of your clinical notes, narrative comments, small-group and team-based work, and project assessments. Phase 3 courses are also pass/fail and judged mainly on your clinical work.

The school's curriculum and admissions pages call the curriculum pass/fail, and the Academic Guidelines make one exception. The seven core clerkships are graded honors, high pass, pass or fail, and those grades go on your transcript. Each grade combines parts such as clinical performance, OSCEs, an oral exam, workplace-based assessments of your work with patients and a shelf exam, one of NBME's national Clinical Science Subject Exams. Each clerkship explains its breakdown at orientation, and its narrative summary feeds your Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the school's letter to residency programs.

The USMLE has three steps. Step 1 tests your grasp of the basic sciences behind medicine and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. Step 2 CK tests your clinical knowledge and how you apply it to patient care. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), which accredits MD programs in the United States, lists Pritzker as fully accredited, with its next survey in 2028-29. Students of LCME-accredited programs are eligible to take the USMLE.

You must pass both Step 1 and Step 2 CK to graduate. Step 1 must be taken by the school's deadline in early February of year 2 and passed before Phase 2 begins. If you fail the first attempt, you cannot start clerkships and take a year to pass before rejoining Phase 2. For Step 2 CK, the 2026-27 Academic Guidelines say to sit it by July 1 of your senior year, while the school's calendars give July 15.

In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. That replaced a start in 2028, announced in June 2026. The USMLE has also urged schools to review their rules on when students must take the Step exams.

On the current schedule, a student entering in August 2027 would start the Step 1 study block in about January 2029, the month designated testing dates begin. The school's deadline to sit Step 1 would fall in early February 2029, and the Step 2 CK deadline in July 2030. Step 2 CK will also move to designated dates; the USMLE says it will not be offered in some months, with dates published more than a year ahead. These dates are projections from the 2025-26 and 2026-27 calendars.

• Formal feedback comes by the midpoint of every course and clerkship. Each assessment allows two attempts; failing the retake fails the course, and failing a course twice can lead to dismissal.
• Catch-up deadlines: year 1 courses must be passed by August 1, and year 2 retakes finished before the Transition to Phase 2.
• Older lines on the school's site still give December 1 of the fourth year as the Step 2 CK deadline (policies page) and a 2020-21 accreditation review (About page). The USMLE requirements page keeps a December 1 heading but says the deadline moved to July 1 for students entering from 2020.

Most clinical training happens on the UChicago Medicine campus in Hyde Park, steps from the medical school. Its core is the Center for Care and Discovery, a 10-story building, alongside Comer Children's Hospital, Mitchell Hospital and the Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine. The school says most inpatient rotations are here or at Endeavor Health NorthShore, and outpatient work is concentrated at the University of Chicago's own clinics.

Endeavor Health, whose hospitals include NorthShore, describes itself as the school's primary teaching affiliate. Six of the seven core clerkships can place you at NorthShore: internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics and psychiatry, plus surgery and neurology at its Evanston site. The course catalog also lists NorthShore versions of the emergency medicine clerkship and of several sub-internships.

You do not pick sites directly. Before Phase 2 you rank all 24 clerkship pathways, the possible schedules for the year, in a lottery that takes students in random order. Afterward you can swap a whole pathway with a classmate. Departments set each rotation's location, though some consider preferences, and if an assignment means living away from home you must be told at least a month ahead.

For off-site clerkships the school reimburses mileage if you drive, plus tolls and Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) or Metra fares, but not parking or cabs. If you live in Hyde Park or Kenwood and must reach the medical center before 7 a.m. for surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics or internal medicine, half your Uber or Lyft fare is refunded.

Electives are rotations or courses you choose. Phase 1 has a required 50-unit S&D elective in spring: a track elective, preparation for the Summer Research Program, or independent study with a mentor. The Department of Family Medicine also runs a Culinary Medicine elective in Phase 1, and the Medical Education track's first-year elective is a 10-week primer on medical education.

Phase 3 holds most of the choice. A two-round lottery assigns its courses, and you can trade electives one for one before schedules are final. You can also design an independent study in research, basic science or clinical work with a faculty sponsor. Family Medicine's Phase 3 electives alone include sports medicine, integrative medicine and osteopathic manipulative medicine.

Away rotations are electives at other schools' hospitals, often a chance to see a residency program up close. The school says some specialties expect them, including dermatology, emergency medicine, neurosurgery, ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery, otolaryngology, plastic surgery, urology and vascular surgery. You can do up to three, with credit for two, and the Academic Guidelines allow up to two months of outside clinical electives for credit.

Many host schools take applications through the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Visiting Student Learning Opportunities service, with deadlines generally from February to April, and you need to have passed Step 1. International experiences for credit require the school's global health checklist six weeks before departure.

Research is part of the MD through S&D, the school's scholarly concentration program. Every MD student completes a mentored project by graduation in one of seven tracks: Basic/Translational Sciences, Clinical Research, Health Services and Data Science, Community Health, Global Health, Medical Education, and Healthcare Delivery Improvement Sciences. S&D runs in years 1, 2 and 4, with no project requirement in the clerkship year. A sentence on several pages still mentions five fields, which is older wording.

Year 1 brings a research orientation, including a one-hour ethics lecture that counts as the university's human subjects training, and a letter suggesting mentors and projects. In the final year you file a Learning Plan by early July and complete at least 100 S&D units, up to 300. That usually means one to three months of project work, though a project-related non-clinical elective can also count. A 500-word abstract, e-poster and reflection are due in early spring.

The Senior Scientific Session, a judged research forum, is listed as required on the Phase 3 page, in the Guidelines' credit list and on the 2026-27 calendar. The S&D pages call it optional but encouraged, worth 100 extra units, and the scholarly opportunities page says nearly a third of each graduating class takes part. Pritzker, NorthShore and Kiphart Fellowships fund year-long research projects after the clerkship year, international ones included.

Five master's degrees can be added, each with its own admission. They are the MD/MBA (Booth School of Business), MD/MA in Public Policy (Harris School of Public Policy), MD/MPH, MD/MS in Biomedical Informatics (Graham School) and MD/MS in Applied Data Science. Both degrees take about five years in total, and the pages say students typically start the second degree after three years of medical school.

The MSTP, founded in 1967 and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), pairs the MD with a PhD in the biological or physical sciences or molecular engineering. You take one year of medical school, four years of PhD work and three more years of medical school, about eight years in all. MSTP students start in June and must be US citizens or permanent residents.

MeSH pairs the MD with a social sciences or humanities PhD, usually starting with two years of graduate school. Former students have taken PhDs in anthropology, economics, public policy and philosophy, though the MeSH page notes a 2026-27 pause in Harris PhD admissions. The GDDTP is for current students who choose a PhD after year 1 or 2, preferably year 2, and offers NIH support for up to five years. It is open only to US citizens and permanent residents.

• Without adding a degree, Phase 1 students can apply in January for the Certificate in Healthcare Delivery Science and Innovation. It requires extra coursework, at least 16 events or lectures and a practicum, which an S&D project in a health services or healthcare delivery track can fill.
• Dated details: both dual-degree pages still show a January 15, 2021 deadline for the MD/MPH application.
• The MSTP page gives 84 current students in its figures and an MSTP student body of 80 in its text.

The Clinical Performance Center, on the lower level of the Biological Sciences Learning Center at 924 East 57th Street, is the school's standardized patient and simulation center. Its web page still describes courses from the previous curriculum. It lists nine exam rooms with recording cameras and computers for reviewing encounters, a HARVEY cardiac patient simulator with 27 disease states, and task trainers for breast, pelvic and prostate exams.

Culinary medicine sessions in the Ambulatory Clerkship take place in a university kitchen. Pediatrics students and some obstetrics and gynecology students go to NorthShore for simulation, and Virtual Microscopy offers an online collection of pathology slides.

Every student joins one of four advising Societies, named after figures from the university's history: Coggeshall, Huggins, Lewis and Rowley. Each mixes students from all four classes, so advice passes between classes as well as from faculty. Each also has its own faculty career advisors, two or three per Society on the current list. In years 3 and 4 you meet your advisor one-on-one to steer you through the Match.

For academic help there is an associate dean for academic advising and fourth-year peer mentors who help younger students navigate the curriculum. The university's Academic Skills Assessment Program helps with study skills, exam preparation and test anxiety. Academic Progress Committees of course and clerkship directors meet each quarter to review progress and can recommend support such as a learning specialist.

Faculty ombudspersons, physicians with no role in grading students, and peer ombudspersons from the student leaders called Pritzker Chiefs help when problems arise. The school offers wellness grants, and a student Wellness Committee runs events. Health care through UChicago Student Wellness is confidential, and you will not be treated by anyone who supervises your clinical work.