The Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine MD program

In Years 1 and 2 you take two science courses at a time, with PCM alongside all year. Anatomy lectures are prerecorded, to be watched the night before each lab so you come prepared.

PCM rests on the idea that the patient sits at the center of the care team. Its 2024-25 introduction describes lectures, small-group discussions and hands-on work: mentor and shadowing programs, simulated patients, real patient encounters, reflection papers and skills workshops.

Some topics, which the school calls vertically integrated curricula (VICs), are taught in sessions spread across several courses and clerkships rather than in a single block. The school's 2026-27 Academic Policy Manual gives point-of-care ultrasound, radiology, end-of-life care and personal and professional development as examples, and the 2026-27 curriculum map also lists a Nutrition VIC. Your transcript reports them together as Topics in Clinical Medicine (TCM). In Year 1, for instance, you attend five ultrasound labs and sit a radiology exam on topics from anatomy.

From Year 3, most learning happens on clerkships. The emergency medicine clerkship, for example, adds four education days with simulation, ultrasound training and case discussions. PCM-3 brings the class back on nine seminar days, with representative topics such as end-of-life care, interprofessional teamwork, the opioid epidemic and caring for immigrant neighbors.

Structure of the Human Body covers gross anatomy, neuroanatomy and embryology. It runs in the fall of Year 1, from October to December on the 2026-27 curriculum map, alongside Health Systems Science and PCM-1.

The latest posted syllabus, for 2025-26, puts you in a section of 60 students and a study group of six. Each section spends 55 minutes in the lab every day, at 8:30, 9:30 or 10:30 am, switching slots after each exam. Groups find the structures on that day's list using bones, models, seven whole-body donors prosected by faculty, prosected and plastinated specimens and digital images, with faculty on hand to check.

In that syllabus, dissection is voluntary. You can sign up to dissect the region for the next exam with a group of six or seven, for 5 to 10 hours. Supervised sessions are usually on Thursday and Friday afternoons, and the lab is open 24 hours. In 2024-25, by contrast, every student had been assigned to a dissection group.

There are five exams, each mixing vignette-style multiple-choice questions with identification questions on images of the donors and specimens. Ultrasound questions are included because ultrasound training is paired with the course. The course is pass/fail, with a pass at 70 percent.

Donors come through the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois. Required blessing ceremonies open and close the course. You also write a pass/fail reflection on how learning from a donor shaped you, which goes into a book made available to donors' families.

Patient contact starts in Year 1. In PCM-1 you interview standardized patients, and the interviews are recorded so your facilitator can review them. You also practice in physical exam workshops and sit a physical exam OSCE and combined history and physical OSCEs. An OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) is a series of timed encounters scored by examiners.

Outside the classroom, first-year students join the M1 Physician Preceptor Program and the M1/M3 Student Mentor Program, which pairs them with third-year students. The school also points to student organizations linked to free and reduced-cost clinics, and to Loyola Street Medicine, which brings faculty, residents and students to people experiencing homelessness.

In Year 2, the PCM-2 preceptor program takes you to patients. In the 2022 course description, students met a preceptor in clinic or on the wards about every other week from September to April and wrote up five full histories and physical exams.

The grading scale runs Honors, High Pass, Pass, Pass in a pass/fail course, Remediated Pass, Unsatisfactory and Fail. Anatomy (pass at 70 percent in the 2025-26 syllabus), Topics in Clinical Medicine and each of its VICs, PCM-4 and the ethics paper are graded pass/fail. Electives use Honors to Fail unless noted.

Class rank comes from a numerical score in each required course and clerkship, weighted by clock hours. It places you in the upper, middle or lower third, released in July of Year 4 and considered in your Medical Student Performance Evaluation, the dean's letter for residency applications. A final ranking sets Latin honors: summa cum laude for the top 5 percent, magna cum laude for 6 to 10 percent and cum laude for 11 to 20 percent.

The USMLE is the national licensing exam, taken in three steps, with Step 3 during residency. Step 1 has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022, while Step 2 CK is still reported as a three-digit score. Stritch requires you to sit Step 1 before Year 3 orientation and to pass it to continue in clerkships.

Readiness is judged on NBME practice exams: everyone sits the Comprehensive Basic Science Exam in January and self-assessments in March and April. Reaching the school's benchmark score clears you to sit Step 1 before Year 3. Anyone still short after the April self-assessment follows an individual plan and a Step Prep elective in May and June, delaying Year 3. All students must sit Step 1 by July 1, whatever their practice scores, and pass by December 31.

Step 2 CK follows Year 3 and must be sat by December 31 of Year 4, with a pass at least two months before graduation. Stritch allows three attempts at each Step.

In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. A June 2026 notice had named 2028. On the current schedule, a 2027 entrant would sit Step 1 in about March or April 2029 and Step 2 CK by December 31, 2030, so both would fall under the new model. Calendars from 2027-28 onward are not yet posted, and the school's Step 1 policy already notes that timing may depend on available USMLE testing dates.

• Courses and clerkships use their own mix of exams, OSCEs, projects, presentations, lab work, small-group work and clinical evaluations. To pass, you must also meet the minimum standard in every competency a course assesses, out of eight that run from medical knowledge to personal and professional development.
• OSCEs run from Year 1, with an end-of-life OSCE in Year 3 and a final exam and OSCE in each sub-internship. Students at the Florida and Indiana sites return to campus in their final week for the clerkship OSCE and NBME shelf exam, a standardized end-of-rotation test.
• The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits MD programs in the United States. Its directory, updated October 14, 2026, lists Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine (Maywood) as Full, with its next survey in 2026-27. Initial accreditation is given as on or prior to 1942, the year the LCME was founded.
• For MD students, enrollment in an LCME-accredited program is what makes you eligible to sit the USMLE; osteopathic (DO) students and international graduates qualify through other routes.

All required clerkships take place at Loyola University Medical Center or another site the school designates. LUMC, next to the medical school in Maywood, is the flagship and primary teaching site. It is a Loyola Medicine hospital, part of Trinity Health, with 547 licensed beds, a Level 1 trauma center, a burn center, a comprehensive stroke center and a children's hospital.

Loyola Medicine's other hospitals are Gottlieb Memorial Hospital, a community hospital in Melrose Park with 247 licensed beds, and MacNeal Hospital, a teaching hospital in Berwyn with 374 licensed beds. Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital, 12 miles west of downtown Chicago, has 483 beds and names Stritch as its primary affiliation.

The school also lists West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park as an internal medicine clerkship site. When this guide was checked in October 2026, the hospital's own website said it had temporarily suspended some patient care services.

Sites are assigned separately from your track, four to six weeks before each clerkship. Surgery, Neurology, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Family Medicine use site lotteries, apart from sites that require fluent Spanish, while OB/GYN and Medicine sites are assigned directly rather than by lottery. Assignments are binding, and some services at some sites expect weekend work. Year 4 sub-internship services come from a lottery run in reverse order of your track lottery number.

A few students rotate out of state, on internal medicine in Naples, Florida, or family medicine in Mishawaka, Indiana. Both come with a travel stipend, a furnished apartment and Zoom teaching alongside local conferences. After tracks are set, a survey asks who wants to go; if places remain, a lottery fills them, and students who cannot travel must say so and meet Student Affairs.

The school recommends a driver's license and a car, especially in the clinical years, because sites are spread across Chicagoland, Florida and Indiana and daily schedules may not allow carpooling.

• Clinical hours are capped at 80 a week averaged over four weeks, with one day in seven free. In-house call comes no more than every fourth night and lasts at most 24 hours. The school reimburses a taxi or rideshare if you are too tired to drive after call.

Electives are rotations you choose. The 2026-27 Academic Policy Manual (revised August 2026) and the Class of 2027 graduation requirements (updated September 24, 2026) set a minimum of 20 weeks of elective credit. From the Class of 2028 on, which includes students entering in 2027, the personal and professional development VIC counts as one week of it. Required Year 4 rotations, PCM-4 and Transition to Residency do not count toward the total.

Within that, you need at least 12 weeks of full-time clinical electives in Year 4, which excludes research and online courses. No more than 12 weeks in one specialty count, and the school recommends four to eight. You must also be enrolled full time for at least 12 weeks in the final five periods, December to April.

Your first elective is the four-week block in Year 3, which must be taken at Loyola. In Year 4 up to 12 weeks can be away rotations, also called extramural electives, at other medical schools. You usually apply through Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO), a service of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Part-time electives add limited credit: up to two weeks from Years 1 and 2 and four from Years 3 and 4. Options include Medical Spanish and Medical Polish, Healer's Art, Clinical Reasoning, Introduction to Osteopathic Medicine and Medical Teaching, in which fourth-year students lead PCM-2 small groups. The 2026-27 Academic Policy Manual also lists a fourth-year Medical Teaching Elective in its Year 4 curriculum.

Community and global health electives include the Street Medicine Consult Service, at LUMC and a Blue Line train station in Forest Park, and two weeks with The Night Ministry in March. Others offer primary care with the Navajo Nation in Chinle, Arizona, or the Oglala Lakota Nation.

International electives through the Center for Community and Global Health (CCGH) are open to fourth-year students in good academic standing, for 4 to 8 weeks of credit. Sites with long-standing ties to Loyola, in Bolivia, Vietnam, Peru and Ghana, offer four-week rotations supervised by local doctors. Some funding may be available as reimbursement, but it does not cover the full cost.

The MD/PhD aims to finish both degrees in seven to eight years: the first two years of medical school, three to four years of PhD research, then the last two years of the MD. The PhD is in one of six tracks of the Integrated Program in Biomedical Sciences. They are Biochemistry, Molecular and Cancer Biology; Cell and Molecular Physiology; Integrative Cell Biology; Microbiology and Immunology; Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics; and Neuroscience. Students sit Step 1 in spring of Year 2 and present their work at monthly MD/PhD meetings.

The five-year MD/MPH (Master of Public Health), with Loyola's Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health, takes up to 10 students a year. You complete 11 MPH courses (33 credits) in an extra year before Year 1, which the program calls M0. Six credits transfer from Year 3 or 4 electives, and a two-credit capstone fits in a research elective or discretionary time. Tracks are Epidemiology, Policy and Management, and Global Health Equity.

The MD/MA in Bioethics & Health Policy, run with the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics, is studied online alongside the MD. Students usually start in the second semester of Year 1 and finish in about three and a half years. They complete 30 credits (five required and five elective courses) and write a publishable-quality capstone paper.

For research, STAR is an eight-week summer program after Year 1 with a mentor you choose. Selected projects win scholarships, backed by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) T35 training grant, and you present at St. Albert's Day, the fall research forum. STAR leads into the Research Honors Program: monthly seminars in Year 2, a four-week research elective and an original manuscript submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. STAR cannot be combined with the Community and Global Health Honors Program.

The Bioethics & Professionalism Honors Program is a three-year portfolio program ending in a capstone project, and the Community and Global Health Honors Program runs four years. Its students can apply in Year 3 to become Global Health Scholars, adding a fellowship year at a clinic in Palacios, Bolivia, before Year 4. The Academic Policy Manual also allows a leave for research or advanced study.

The Physician's Vocation Program is an optional four-year program for students who want to explore how faith and medicine meet. It offers a course on Jesuit, or Ignatian, spirituality and medicine in Year 1 and one on religion and medicine in Year 2. In Year 3 you work through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, a structured program of prayer and reflection, with a spiritual director alongside your clerkships. A fourth-year service elective closes the program.

The Cuneo Center, the medical school's building since 1997, holds the anatomy lab on its lower level and the three student Communities around a central atrium. The Health Sciences Library runs a 24-hour Information Commons in the nursing school building and lends anatomical models and bone boxes.

The Center for Simulation Education runs the campus simulation spaces. The Frederick M. Selfridge Clinical Skills Center, in the Cuneo Center, has 14 rooms set up as clinic exam rooms for recorded encounters with standardized participants, as the center calls them. The Walgreen Family Virtual Hospital, on the third floor of the nursing school, has six simulation bays with control and debriefing rooms. Fourth-year emergency medicine students join monthly team simulations there with nursing and pharmacy students.

The Stamm Procedural Training Center lets you practice basic procedures on models, and the Advanced Procedure Education Center adds laparoscopic and virtual reality training. Students are automatic members of the 62,000-square-foot Loyola University Center for Fitness next door.

Advising is built into PCM. Your faculty academic advisor facilitates your PCM-1 small group and meets you one to one at least once a semester in Year 2. The same advisor then leads your PCM-3 reflection group and helps with residency applications. Career advisors work alongside them, and every October brings Career Development Month, with CV workshops and mock interviews.

The Academic Center for Excellence (ACE) offers study plans, peer tutoring, test-taking strategies and preparation for Steps 1 and 2. Students Advising Students, a group of third- and fourth-year students, advises on boards, clerkships, OSCEs and residency applications.

Each student belongs to one of three Communities in the Cuneo Center: Curie, de Porres or Osler. Each holds a third of every class, with mailboxes, lockers, seating and a study area open 24 hours, so students from all four years mix. The campus Wellness Center, opened in January 2023, offers medical and counseling visits at no cost and 24-hour crisis support. Health Sciences Campus Ministry offers reflection groups, retreats and spiritual direction to students of any background.