The FSU College of Medicine MD program

The pre-clerkship courses are integrated and organized by body system, grouped in the handbook as Foundations of Medicine, Human Systems in Health and Disease, and Preparation for Clinical Medicine. Each course integrates the basic, behavioral and clinical sciences, from anatomy to pharmacology, with medical humanities and the social sciences.

Teaching follows the biopsychosocial model, which considers the biological, psychological and social factors behind a patient's health. Formal lectures are limited. Before class you do readings and work through videos and notes on OnlineMedEd, an online teaching platform, then use class time to apply that knowledge to clinical cases. Whenever possible, real patients come to share their stories.

Evidence-based medicine runs through both years. Courses include journal clubs, and from the Year 1 Host-Defense course onward you complete PICO assignments, framing a clinical question by patient, intervention, comparison and outcome. In Year 1 you also review medications on a virtual case with pharmacy (PharmD) students from Florida A&M University.

From Year 3 you learn mainly alongside your clerkship faculty and meet your clerkship director weekly, while Doctoring 3 carries case-based teaching through the year.

The 2025-26 course guide for Foundations of Medicine 1 gives a feel for Year 1. Each week has two mornings of physical exam practice in the CLC, a skills check on Thursday, and a Tuesday morning small group with a pair of clinical and behavioral science faculty. Friday mornings link anatomy to radiology, and large-group sessions, dissection and daily self-study fill the rest.

On a Year 3 block clerkship you work at least four full days a week with your clerkship faculty. One day goes to Doctoring 3: Wednesday afternoon sessions plus a half day alternating between your longitudinal clinic and your quality-improvement project. Call varies: surgery runs Monday to Saturday with overnight call twice a week, while psychiatry has no required overnight call.

In the Marianna LIC, a sample week starts each day with hospital time from 6:30 to 8 am, then a specialty each morning. Family medicine fills Tuesday afternoons and Doctoring 3 Wednesday afternoons, and the other afternoons are independent learning in hospital areas you choose, such as radiology.

Anatomy is taught mainly in Foundations of Medicine 1: Organization and Structure, the summer course that opens Year 1. Alongside cadaver dissection it covers embryology, cross-sectional anatomy and radiologic imaging, tied to the physical exam you are learning. Histology, the study of tissue under the microscope, uses guided videos and a virtual microscope slide box.

Each lab team splits into two sub-teams that alternate days. One dissects while the other studies, practices the related physical exam in the CLC and views prosected specimens, which experts have already dissected. At the end of each lab day the dissecting team's captain shows the others what was found.

Bodies are donated through the Anatomical Board of the State of Florida, and everyone in the lab signs a Pledge of Respect. Practical exams ask you to identify tagged structures on cadavers, models, skeletons and images. The Year 2 Neuroscience course includes dissection lab sessions. Some students also return in the summer after Year 1 as teaching assistants.

Patient contact begins in a controlled setting: from the first weeks you practice the physical exam on classmates and standardized patients in the CLC, with weekly skills checks. The first week also introduces rural communities, one of the pillars of the college's mission.

In the fall of Year 1, the Senior Mentor Program pairs you and a classmate with an older adult who lives independently in the community. You visit three times to practice listening and history taking. From the spring you spend a half day about every other week with a preceptor, a community physician who teaches you in their office. Preceptor visits continue in Year 2.

Year 1 ends with the Summer Clinical Practicum: three weeks in May or June caring for patients under a primary care physician's direct supervision. Sites are rural, urban or geriatric settings across Florida and into southern Georgia. You take focused histories and exams, help patients quit tobacco and write a SOAP note, a standard clinical note. You also interview one patient with no set agenda, simply asking what they think you should know about their situation.

Years 1 and 2 are graded pass/fail, using specifications grading. You must earn a minimum number of points across exams, clinical skills checks, assignments and professionalism items, such as arriving on time and prepared, with an exam average of at least 70%. A lower average brings a temporary IR grade (incomplete, pending remediation), then remediation or repeating the course.

Exams mix faculty-written questions with customized NBME exams drawn from the national board's question bank, mostly set in clinical scenarios, and they are cumulative. Each pre-clerkship OSCE needs a score of at least 80%.

Year 3 and 4 required clerkships are graded Honors, High Pass, Pass or Fail; sub-internships Honors, Pass or Fail; and required courses such as Doctoring 3 pass/fail. Your education director grades each clerkship from faculty and clerkship director assessments, projects, patient and staff evaluations, your patient log and an end-of-clerkship exam. There are no grade quotas, so any student who meets the criteria can earn Honors.

Most clerkships end with an NBME clinical subject exam, or shelf exam, usually of 110 questions; the sub-internships have none. Honors needs at least the 75th percentile, High Pass the 60th and Pass the 10th, while geriatrics uses its own 74-question exam with cut-offs of 86%, 82% and 70%. Failing at the first attempt means a retake within 90 days and a grade no higher than Pass.

You log patients in the Encounter Tracking System (ETS), recording whether you observed, assisted or performed each encounter, against minimums from 25 in psychiatry to 110 in surgery. You also get formal feedback from your clerkship director at mid-rotation.

To graduate, you must pass every course and clerkship, Step 1, Step 2 CK and the graduation OSCE in Year 3, all within six years. You also complete required procedures and Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS) and Basic Life Support (BLS) training. Step 1 tests the sciences basic to medicine and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022; Step 2 CK tests clinical knowledge for supervised patient care.

• Step 1 is taken before the Pre-Clerkship Preparation Boot Camp at the end of Year 2. Step 2 CK must be taken by December 31 of the year before you graduate.
• On the current schedule, a student entering in May 2027 would take Step 1 in about March or April 2029 and start clerkships in June 2029. Step 2 CK would be due by December 31, 2030, before graduation in May 2031.
• In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. Its June 2026 notice had named 2028. Both exams for a 2027 entrant would fall after the change, and the program has asked schools to review rules on when students must test.
• For MD students, enrollment in an LCME-accredited program is what makes you eligible for Step 1 and Step 2 CK. Students of osteopathic medicine (DO) and of schools outside the United States qualify through other routes.

The college calls itself community-based: clinical training uses hospitals, physicians' offices, clinics, nursing homes, residency programs and public health units rather than one teaching hospital. Each regional campus has offices, teaching rooms and student areas near its clinical sites, and local clerkship directors run its rotations in eight fields, from family medicine to emergency medicine.

In the summer of Year 1 you rank all eight sites: the six regional campuses, the Marianna rural program and Thomasville, Georgia. You can add up to a page explaining your choices, and a student affairs committee assigns places to match preferences as closely as it can, with results about a week later. Each site's number of places depends on its teaching resources.

Once assignments are final, you can swap with another student if you both request it in writing and the associate dean for student affairs approves. You move to your campus for Year 3, and student support coordinators there help with local housing. In Year 4 you can ask to take required clerkships at another campus or at Immokalee, if the host has a place and faculty free.

In Years 1 and 2 you can take Medical Spanish, from elementary courses for beginners to an intermediate course built on interviews and role play with native speakers.

In Year 3, the two four-week Flex electives let you explore specialties early, strengthen skills or add inpatient time. They run at your home campus or Immokalee, are graded pass/fail, and can also be used to remediate a clerkship or retake a USMLE exam. Advanced Flex electives require the matching core clerkship first, except in emergency medicine.

Year 4 electives total at least 16 weeks, usually in four-week blocks, graded Honors, Pass or Fail. At least 8 weeks must be FSU College of Medicine electives, one must be in a core medicine topic, and no more than three, or 12 weeks, can be in one discipline. You also need at least 4 weeks in a residency program, through a required clerkship or an elective.

Away rotations, which the college calls externships, are electives outside its own campuses. They can be at other LCME-accredited schools, at residency programs approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) or abroad, with up to three, or 12 weeks, allowed in most years. Most externships take applications only through Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO), a common application run by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). For 2024-25, the clerkship-years manual put the number of participating institutions at over 300. A Year 4 International Medicine Elective is possible with approval.

The 2026-27 Bulletin lists the college's elective courses, from rural family medicine and hospice care to forensic pathology and wilderness medicine. Neurology builds on the Year 2 Neuroscience course through the Neurology, Pediatric Neurology, Neuropsychology and Medical Externship in Neurology electives.

The required scholarly work is the Doctoring 3 quality-improvement (QI) project. After five online modules from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), groups of three to five pick an evidence-based, measurable problem with a clinical partner. Using Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, a method of testing a change and measuring its effect, your group designs and measures an intervention, with a half day every other week for the work.

The group writes it up as a journal-style article and presents it to peers, faculty and community partners. Research beyond that is optional and encouraged, with program directors for medical student research in both the pre-clerkship and clerkship years.

Two fellowships run in the summer after Year 1. The Summer Research Fellowship funds 10 weeks of full-time research with an FSU faculty mentor, on an existing project or your own, and fits around either Summer Clinical Practicum session. The joint fellowship with Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville places you with a Mayo mentor for 10 weeks, ending with a written summary and talk. Both are competitive.

Other routes include the Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic (TOC) Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Research Program and the research electives listed in the Bulletin. For time out to earn another degree, such as a Master of Public Health (MPH), PhD or MBA, or to do research, the clerkship-years manual describes an educational or research leave of absence.

Years 1 and 2 are taught in the John E. Thrasher Building on FSU's main campus. Its second floor holds the Learning Communities, student spaces open 24 hours a day with group study rooms, a kitchen, lounge, showers and lockers. The college describes them as encouraging group learning rather than competition, and each regional campus also has study areas and a learning community.

The Clinical Learning Center, on the Thrasher Building's lower level, has 14 examination rooms and two consultation rooms with audiovisual recording. Its adult and infant mannequins can simulate conditions from wheezing to cardiac arrest. The handbook also lists the Charlotte E. Maguire and Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare Center for Clinical Simulation, where you learn skills on patient simulators and models.

The anatomy laboratory, on the lower level of the Biomedical Sciences building, and its study room with models, skeletons and anatomy software are open around the clock during the semester. The Charlotte Edwards Maguire Medical Library delivers over 95% of its resources electronically. A 24-hour Wellness Center has exercise equipment, and every student receives a laptop.

You get a faculty advisor in Year 1 and meet them at least once a semester in Years 1 and 2. At your regional campus a new advisor helps with specialty choice, your Year 4 plan, Step 2 preparation and letters of recommendation. Regional campus deans meet each student individually in July and January of Year 3 and in July of Year 4.

Career advising runs through all four years, using the AAMC's Careers in Medicine program and required sessions from CV writing to residency applications. Student support coordinators help with personal, professional and academic needs in every year.

The Office of Student Counseling Services offers confidential, no-cost therapy and academic support, including Step exam preparation, from psychologists and learning specialists who play no part in grading. Regional campus students also get no-cost after-hours telepsychology: remote sessions with psychologists under contract to the office. No-cost telepsychiatry is available to them too, with referrals coordinated through the office. Faculty who evaluate you cannot be your doctor or counselor.

Before moving, the handbook advises setting up care with a primary care provider near your campus about three months ahead and bringing a three- to six-month supply of any regular medicines.