The Emory University School of Medicine MD program

In Foundations most science comes in courses of two to five weeks, first on normal function in Healthy Human, then on disease, organ system by organ system. Biochemistry, immunology, microbiology, pathology and pharmacology run through the blocks as threads, not separate courses.

Small groups carry the clinical side. In Essentials of Patient Care, a course spanning all four years, your Small Group Advisor teaches professionalism, communication, physical examination and diagnostic thinking, along with ethics, preventive medicine and wellness. Sessions use discussion, case analysis and role play, and you practice on classmates, standardized patients (actors trained to play patients) and real patients. Some problem-based learning, where a group works through a case together, happens here too.

Several strands run across the four years. The current chart lists six longitudinal threads: diversity, equity, inclusion and racial advocacy; climate change and environmental health; clinical reasoning; interprofessional education; ethics in medicine; and quality and safety. Community Learning and Social Medicine adds 18 months of classroom work on health equity, climate justice and the social determinants of health, the living and working conditions that shape health.

From the clerkship year, teaching moves to the wards and clinics. You learn on teams of residents led by attending physicians, the senior doctors responsible for patients, and most rotations add weekly conferences or case sessions. Your small group keeps meeting, and three Integration weeks gather the class for topics beyond any one clerkship, such as patient safety, communication and service learning.

Anatomy is taught by dissection. The 2026-27 catalog describes a first-year course, shared with physician assistant students, in which you learn regional anatomy through faculty-guided dissection of human donors, case-based discussion and independent study. The dean calls the shared course new in fall 2026, and the catalog lists it at five weeks. The chart for the Class of 2028, who entered in 2024, instead spreads anatomy lab across roughly November to April of year 1.

The lab has 24 dissection tables, each with a computer that displays cross-sectional imaging, study guides, lecture notes and other references at the table. The school provides lab coats for anatomy, and the catalog's supply list asks you to bring nitrile or latex gloves.

Anatomy has its own exams. It is not graded as a separate course, but you must reach the standard in the anatomy syllabus. Each failed anatomy exam is remediated individually, with a first attempt within two weeks of notice. The 2025-26 catalog also listed a senior elective, Surgical Anatomy, Embryology and Operative Techniques, that takes students heading for surgery or obstetrics and gynecology back to dissection.

Your first clinical exposure comes at the very start. Since 2026, orientation has been Crossing the Threshold, a two-week course that the dean's May 2026 message calls new. The 2026-27 catalog says it combines clinical exposure, skills training, reflection and community building, partly shared with other health science students. The Four Phases and Clinical Experience pages still describe the earlier format, Week on the Wards, a week of shadowing before Healthy Human that the 2025-26 catalog paired with orientation.

Clinical skills then start in your small group: communication, history taking and examination, practiced on standardized patients while physicians observe. In the spring of year 1, according to the obstetrics and gynecology department, you learn breast and pelvic examinations with standardized patients.

Within the first few months you begin the Outpatient Experience (OPEX): one afternoon every other week, for 12 months, in an outpatient clinic. You learn from a clinical preceptor, the healthcare team and the patients you see over time. In the same year, Community Learning and Social Medicine places your small group with one of more than 50 Atlanta community partner organizations.

Second-year electives can add clinical time, such as emergency department shadow shifts. Outside the curriculum, students run clinics such as the Harriet Tubman Women's Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured women.

Under the 2026-27 catalog, every course and clerkship is graded satisfactory or unsatisfactory (S/U), the school's pass/fail scale. In Foundations you pass a course if your total score is no more than two standard deviations below the class mean, or above 68.2%. You must pass all Foundations courses before clerkships. A few department pages and course records still mention letter grades, but the catalog's policy is S/U throughout.

On clerkships, National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) subject exams, often called shelf exams, are national end-of-rotation tests used across the Application phase as part of clerkship evaluations. Most clerkships add their own assessments: oral exams in internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry and adult primary care, standardized patient exams in internal medicine, and online Aquifer cases in pediatrics. Fail any required part and you receive a U and repeat the whole clerkship, and the first U stays on your transcript.

After the clerkship year you take the End of Applications OSCE. An OSCE (objective structured clinical examination) is a practical exam of timed clinical encounters, usually with standardized patients. Emory's is comprehensive, sits outside the clerkships and tests clinical and diagnostic reasoning. You book your own date across spring and summer, and you must pass it to graduate.

Step 1 tests the science behind medicine and has been reported pass/fail since January 26, 2022. Emory requires a pass before clerkships, and you may sit it only after passing two NBME practice exams. The catalog sets the deadline three weeks before the Application phase; the 2026-27 calendar puts it on February 9, 2027, with clerkships from March 1, 2027.

The catalog asks you to take Step 2 CK as soon as feasible after the clerkship year and by October 1 of your final year, and you must pass both exams to graduate. In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. The date had already moved once, from 2028.

On the current schedule, a student entering in 2027 would study for Step 1 from about December 2028 to late January 2029. The school deadline would fall in early February, with clerkships from about March 2029, so depending on your test date you could sit Step 1 just before or just after the change. Step 2 CK would follow in about March 2030 if you match the chart's March block, and by October 1, 2030 at the latest.

• These 2027-entry dates are worked out from the 2026-27 calendar, the latest the school has published. The USMLE says it will publish each year's dates more than a year ahead and that Step 2 CK will not be offered in certain months. It has also asked schools to review rules that restrict when students must test.
• The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits MD programs in the United States, and its accreditation is what makes students at an MD program like this one eligible to sit the USMLE. Its directory, updated July 22, 2026, lists Emory as fully accredited, and the school reports keeping full accreditation after a survey visit in March 2024.
• The school's LCME timeline lists a limited survey visit on March 16-17, 2026, the 2025-26 survey shown in the directory. A Department of Medicine page calls it the culmination of a 24-month effort that produced a 120-page action plan, drawing on improvement work begun after the 2024 visit. No outcome has been published.
• Foundations remediation: you are told within three weeks of an exam, agree a tailored plan with the course director, and must finish any outstanding work by December 31 of year 2.
• Graduation also requires mastering the school's 24 Student Physician Activities, its list of a doctor's core tasks. You must also show five technical procedures, including basic life support, defibrillator use and drawing venous blood, and finish within six academic years.

All required rotations take place at Emory and Emory-affiliated facilities across the Atlanta area. Besides Emory Healthcare's own hospitals and clinics, the school trains students in three affiliated systems: the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and Grady Memorial Hospital. The Clinical Training page counts more than 3,000 patient beds in more than half a dozen hospitals.

Grady, a publicly owned safety-net hospital with one of Atlanta's two Level 1 trauma centers, is staffed mainly by Emory faculty, about 80% of its physicians by the school's count. The Atlanta VA partnership dates back to 1946. Pediatric rotations use Children's Arthur M. Blank Hospital, Hughes Spalding Hospital and Center for Advanced Pediatrics; Children's patients come from every county in Georgia.

Some school pages still use older site names. The Four Phases page and the 2026-27 catalog's site list name two of them: Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston, and Wesley Woods Center and Geriatric Care Hospital. A few course records still say Egleston. Children's says Egleston's clinical services moved to its new Arthur M. Blank Hospital on September 29, 2024, and the 2025-26 catalog lists Emory Wesley Woods Center.

How you are assigned varies by clerkship: adult primary care, for example, places you at one family medicine or internal medicine practice in metro Atlanta. Duty hours follow the rules of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), which accredits residencies, and are capped at 80 hours a week. You get a day off each week and, on rotations of four weeks or more, a required wellness half-day each month, no questions asked.

The catalog requires a Foundations elective of at least 15 contact hours, taken as a group experience or a directed study. The chart places an M2 elective in the fall of year 2. The emergency medicine elective, for instance, meets on Friday afternoons from August to November for skills labs in airway management, suturing, splinting, IV access, code simulation and ultrasound, plus at least four shadow shifts. Radiology offers at least one second-year elective each year.

Clinical Perspectives in Global Health, a second-year elective since fall 2017, teaches medical students alongside nursing students and Emory College students minoring in global health. It uses didactic sessions, skills workshops and clinical experiences, with an emphasis on the global burden of disease, ethics and health equity.

In Translation you take three four-week electives, chosen from more than 100 offerings. If nothing fits, you can design one with a faculty preceptor, with advance approval from the Associate Dean of Clinical Education. The 2025-26 catalog adds that proposals are due 90 days ahead, that international experiences can qualify, and that no more than one elective may be a research project.

The 2025-26 elective list shows the range. In emergency ultrasound you perform 100 scans that faculty review, and medical toxicology includes follow-up calls on cases reported to the Georgia Poison Center. Others include forensic pathology at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's medical examiner's office and Law and Medicine, alongside law students serving low-income clients. Medicine, Compassion and the Arts includes a 10-day trip to northern Italy.

Translation also leaves room for away rotations at other schools, which you apply for through the Association of American Medical Colleges' Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) service. Career advising runs a VSLO information session in January of your third year, and the 2025-26 catalog says applications can begin in March, once the Application phase ends.

The MD page lists six dual degrees: MD/PhD, MD/MA in bioethics, MD/MPH, MD/MBA, MD/MSCR and MD/MS in robotics. A second degree that takes an extra year usually replaces Discovery, because it carries its own research. The exceptions are the MD/MBA, whose students complete four of Discovery's five months, and MPH programs that end in a capstone instead of a thesis.

The MD/PhD is Emory's Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), which has held a National Institutes of Health (NIH) training grant continuously since 1987. You complete Foundations, Step 1 and the clerkship year, take Step 2 CK, then earn a PhD through Emory's Laney Graduate School or Georgia Tech, returning for Translation after a two-week clinical refresher course. One program page gives seven to eight years; another gives an average of 8.2. Its sequence page still lists Step 2 CS, a clinical skills exam the USMLE discontinued in 2021.

The MD/MPH, with the Rollins School of Public Health, and the MD/MBA, with the Goizueta Business School, each take five years, with the extra study following the clerkship block. MD/MBA students choose a one-year or two-year MBA format. The MD/MA in bioethics also takes five years: most students begin some Translation rotations, then step out in the fall after year 3. The 2026 class profile counts 9 MD/PhD and 10 MD/MPH students in the first-year class.

The MD/MSCR adds a Master of Science in Clinical Research between years 3 and 4, with at least 30 credit hours, including classes, a thesis and a grant proposal. MD/MSCR students also complete five extra research electives and apply early in year 3. The MD/MS in robotics, built with Georgia Tech, starts with a year of robotics coursework there before four years at Emory, where your Discovery project doubles as the Georgia Tech capstone.

Beyond these six, the catalog describes an MD/MLS: you apply in year 3 to Emory Law School's Master of Legal Studies. Any other degree, at Emory or elsewhere, needs an academic plan agreed beforehand with the Dean of Medical Education.

Without a second degree, you can still ask for more research time. Extended Discovery needs a formal written request to the Director of Discovery. The catalog lists a year on a scholarly project among the planned reasons for taking longer than four years, with approval.

Clinical skills teaching centers on the Human Simulation Education Center (HSEC), on the third floor of the School of Medicine Building. It has four suites, each with a central debrief room with projection and four exam rooms fitted with an exam table and standard clinic equipment. It hosts standardized patient sessions and clinical skills and physical diagnosis teaching.

The Emory Center for Experiential Learning (ExCEL), in the building's basement, is the school's high-fidelity simulation center, about 6,000 square feet. It holds patient simulators, task trainers for specific procedures, space for hybrid simulations that pair simulators with standardized patients, and basic and advanced life support training. Scenarios range from team resuscitation and emergency obstetric care to large-scale disasters.

The society system anchors support. There are four societies, named after four historic physicians; a 2021 faculty essay linked from the Societies page names one of them the Osler Society, after Sir William Osler. Your Small Group Advisor teaches you, supports you and, at Commencement, hoods you.

The school's student success center (CHSS) offers one-to-one academic coaching, learning specialists, expanded tutoring, help with accommodations and access to mental health resources. Its USMLE support includes a Step 1 guide, workshops, tutors and one-to-one planning sessions. Peer tutors are available throughout, and the EMPACT program matches students with physician mentors.

During the clerkship year you choose a faculty advisor to help plan residency applications and your senior schedule, and you meet the associate dean for student affairs. In the final year, the career advising program holds four class meetings to help you carry out your post-graduation plan. Student Health and Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) serve all medical students.

Peer support starts early: the Big Sib/Little Sib program pairs each incoming student with a rising second-year. Students also sit on the subcommittees of the curriculum committee, which oversees and revises the program.