The LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine MD program

Year 1 courses are mostly single disciplines, such as gross anatomy, biochemistry and physiology, with longitudinal courses in clinical and communication skills alongside. Year 2's organ-system courses each teach one system's pathology, microbiology and pharmacology together with screening, examination, diagnosis and treatment.

Sessions mix large and small groups: lectures, TBL, small-group discussions and clinical skills labs. The curriculum goals call for basic and clinical science to be integrated across all four years. In year 2, the clinical skills small groups take up the system you are studying. The last major curriculum revision came in 2015-16, with regular smaller changes since.

Threads run alongside: population medicine and health systems in year 1, and a four-part health equity seminar series across both years. TEAM UP mixes first- and second-years from all six LSU Health schools in interprofessional team projects. In March 2026 the school said its required courses and clerkships already meet a federal benchmark of 40 hours of nutrition teaching.

In years 1 and 2, scheduled teaching averages no more than 23 hours a week over a semester, with 25 at most in any week. That counts lectures, labs, small groups, TBL and skills sessions. With few exceptions you get at least two half-days a week with nothing scheduled.

Preparation for TBL, workshops and anatomy labs is capped at 5 hours a week, including 45 minutes before each anatomy lab. In year 2 the clinical selective and hospital rounds add up to about 5 more hours. The policy plans for at most 30 hours a week of classes, preparation and clinical work, before your own study.

On clerkships the limit is 80 hours a week averaged over the rotation, with overnight call no more than every third night and one day in seven free. After overnight call, patient care ends by 1 PM. On the internal medicine wards, call comes every fourth night and ends by 11 PM, with one to three admissions per call night. Internal medicine consult and clinic weeks have no scheduled call. Surgery teaching fills Thursday mornings, from morbidity and mortality conference at 7:30 to Cohn's Conference at 9:30.

Rotations stop for school holidays, including Mardi Gras Monday and Tuesday, Thanksgiving from Thursday to Sunday and two weeks around Christmas. Seniors on acting internships, where they work as interns, may have to work some of them.

Gross and Developmental Anatomy (ANAT 100) fills much of the first semester: 203 hours of lectures and lab from August to December. Students dissect an entire embalmed cadaver, and students in each dissection group get written narrative feedback from faculty.

The course stays close to the clinic. Clinicians run clinical correlations and hands-on exercises, a community radiologist lectures on imaging, and a staff surgeon discusses clinical issues tied to each dissection. In Cadaver Procedure Labs each student can perform lumbar puncture, oral intubation, chest (thoracostomy) tube insertion and urinary catheterization.

Cell Biology and Microanatomy (86 hours) follows in the spring, using virtual and glass microscope slides. Year 2's 144-hour neuroscience course adds small-group labs and imaging, including MRI. In year 4, a Surgical Anatomy elective aimed at future surgeons reviews the whole body, with students simulating open and minimally invasive operations.

Clinical Skills Integration 101 starts in the fall of year 1 with Basic Life Support, vital signs, universal precautions and surgical scrubbing. You also learn to examine the heart, lungs, head, neck and abdomen. The spring course adds cardiac monitoring, a Stop the Bleed course and emergency assessment.

Real patients come at the start of the spring semester, in a one-week preceptorship you arrange with a primary care physician. On the current calendar it starts on January 4, 2027. Your first-year TEAM UP team also meets a Health Partner, a community volunteer, three times online to learn about their health and goals.

In year 2, history taking, examination and clinical reasoning move into clinical settings, and you choose a clinical selective to explore careers. Procedure labs across both years teach skills such as lumbar puncture, IV placement and intubation. For earlier contact, an optional four-week Primary Care Elective lets you observe primary care physicians in a rural or urban underserved practice.

Courses are graded Honors, High Pass, Pass or Fail, including in the preclerkship years, so most first- and second-year courses are not pass/fail. A few are, such as Clinical Skills Integration 201 and the health equity seminars. A Fail stays on your transcript even after you make it up.

Preclerkship courses give practice questions before exams, as formative feedback that does not count toward grades. In year 2, a final average below 69.5 fails a course; failing only its NBME exam earns an Incomplete and one retake.

Each third-year clerkship combines clinical evaluations, didactic grades such as TBL, and an NBME subject exam, or shelf exam: a national multiple-choice test in that specialty. Failing only the shelf earns an Incomplete, and passing the retake makes the grade a Pass. Clerkships of four weeks or more include mid-clerkship feedback, and faculty narratives feed your Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the summary letter sent with residency applications.

Clinical skills are tested with standardized patients. After a half-day of three scenarios during year 3, you sit a six-scenario OSCE at the end of the year. Completing it is a graduation requirement.

The USMLE is the national exam series for a US medical license. Step 1, on the science behind medicine, has been pass/fail only since January 26, 2022. You prepare for it after second-year classes end in mid-May, and the school's USMLE Guidebook recommends sitting it before year 3 begins, usually at the end of June. Step 2 CK, on clinical knowledge, comes after year 3, at least four weeks before your residency application deadline.

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 announcement had named 2028. On the current schedule, a student entering in 2027 would sit Step 1 in about May or June 2029, a few months after the switch. Step 2 CK would follow after year 3 ends in June 2030, so both would fall under the new model. These are projections from the 2026-27 calendar, not published dates.

• You must pass Step 1 before senior rotations other than flex blocks, and within a year of your first attempt. Both Step 1 and Step 2 CK must be passed to graduate, and a third failure of either means dismissal. The preclerkship and clinical phases must each be finished within three calendar years, not counting leaves of absence.
• Surgery clerkship (2025-26 guide): shelf 30%, general surgery evaluation 25%, subspecialty evaluation 15%, and 10% each for a suture skills lab, didactics and professionalism.
• OB/GYN clerkship (from July 1, 2026): shelf 50%, TBL 30%, preceptor evaluation 15%, professional responsibility 5%; you need at least 62 on the shelf to pass.
• Psychiatry clerkship (department page): shelf 40%, TBL quizzes 40%, clinical skills evaluation 10%, attendance and professionalism 10%; the shelf must be passed.

Everyone spends years 1 and 2 in New Orleans. For years 3 and 4 you are based in New Orleans, at the Baton Rouge regional campus, or, on the Rural Scholar Track, in Lafayette. The curriculum pages name Baton Rouge and Lafayette as regional campuses whose students take all third-year rotations there. New Orleans-based students do most rotations in the city but can do some at regional sites.

In New Orleans the anchor is University Medical Center New Orleans (UMC), part of LCMC Health. UMC opened on Canal Street in August 2015 and has 446 licensed inpatient beds. The dean describes it as the replacement for Charity Hospital and the school's primary teaching hospital for adult care. Pediatrics is based at Manning Family Children's Hospital (formerly Children's Hospital New Orleans). The New Orleans VA Medical Center lists an LSU teaching affiliation, and LSU's physical medicine and rehabilitation section says many students rotate through its VA clinic.

Baton Rouge became a full regional campus in 2014-15. About 25 students per class are assigned there for years 3 and 4: applicants can ask for it, and if fewer than 25 do, a lottery at admission assigns the rest. Other students rotate there for internal medicine, surgery and OB/GYN.

Students assigned to Baton Rouge take all third-year clerkships there, so most relocate. In year 4 they may rotate elsewhere, except for Critical Concepts, which they take in Baton Rouge. The admissions page says these students are required to arrange their housing in Baton Rouge. The Baton Rouge campus page says a student who moves back to New Orleans for year 4 remains a Baton Rouge campus student and is not eligible for free student housing in Baton Rouge.

Rural Scholar Track students have taken all their clerkships in Lafayette since 2003, and other New Orleans students rotate there for internal medicine, surgery, family medicine and OB/GYN. For the four-week family medicine clerkship you join a preceptor's practice in the state and may live in that community, with free housing in the Bogalusa, Lafayette, Lake Charles and Alexandria areas. Assignments follow the clerkship's educational needs, not your preference.

The Primary Care Programs offer extra options for students interested in primary care. Their pages add that New Orleans-based students in them enter the clerkship lottery and can be given preference for Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Bogalusa or Lake Charles.

Year 3's two-week, pass/fail Career Planning Elective lets you try a field you might choose for residency. Options include fields year 3 otherwise leaves out, such as ophthalmology, emergency medicine, radiology, pathology, dermatology and anesthesiology, or a second surgical subspecialty.

In year 4 you pick four four-week electives. The 2026-27 list runs from cardiology and the medical intensive care unit to burn and reconstructive surgery, interventional radiology, addiction psychiatry and narrative medicine. Some prepare you for internship, such as an OB/GYN Boot Camp and Launchpad, an intern preparedness course for internal medicine. A few are for Rural Scholar Track students only.

Away rotations are possible: the catalog lists out-of-state electives in 17 fields, and the 2026-27 offerings add an External Clinical Experience of one to four weeks. Rotations outside Louisiana need an affiliation agreement requested at least two months ahead, and you buy liability insurance if the host requires it.

Family medicine runs the Global Health and Social Medicine electives: a two-week, pass/fail course in year 3 and a longer senior version, both with supervised clinical work abroad. The department lists programs in Peru, Chile, Honduras, Guatemala and Brazil. In 2026 the Medical Spanish clinical elective in Antigua, Guatemala ended with a community health screening run in Spanish.

Closer to home, the DIME elective puts medicine, nursing, pharmacy and social work students together to manage patients with uncontrolled diabetes in an LSU clinic, half a day a week.

The MD/PhD takes seven or more years: the first two years of medical school, about three to four years of graduate research for the PhD, then years 3 and 4. You usually pick a mentor and program in year 2. PhD fields range from biochemistry and genetics to neuroscience and interdisciplinary oncology, and the school counts 40 MD/PhD students.

The four-year MD/MPH with the LSU School of Public Health adds 37 credit hours. It starts with an MPH summer semester before year 1. In 2026 that semester ran from May 20 to July 10. A practice experience follows in the second summer, and a culminating experience comes in spring of year 4. Concentrations are Community Health Science and Policy; Environmental Health, Climate and Sustainability; and Epidemiology and Population Health. The school counts 60 MD/MPH students.

Without a second degree, you can take an optional full-time research year at LSU or elsewhere, with the deans' approval. The Honors Research Program is for students who did well in year 1 and have research experience. You research part-time through years 2 to 4 and publish or submit a thesis by spring of year 4, graduating with Honors in Research.

About 30 students a year join a seven-week summer research internship, with mentors at LSU Health, UMC, Pennington Biomedical or Manning Family Children's Hospital. Research electives in years 1 to 3 teach you to plan a project, write a protocol and present results, and a four-week senior research elective follows.

A separate Integrated OMS MD Program admits 4 oral and maxillofacial surgery residents a year directly into year 2, counting their dental education in place of year 1.

Skills training starts early in year 1 in the Isidore Cohn, Jr., MD Student Learning Center, which has four simulation and demonstration labs and eight small-group teaching rooms. Flooded by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it reopened in 2009 above the Russell C. Klein Center for Advanced Practice, which has simulation classrooms, a simulation operating room and a 32-station cadaveric surgery classroom.

The Center for Advanced Learning and Simulation (CALS) opened in December 2023 in the former Hotel Dieu, the Interim LSU Hospital after Hurricane Katrina until UMC opened in 2015. It holds 16 standardized patient exam rooms, six simulation rooms, a simulated emergency department with 10 bed spaces and a 16-station fresh-tissue lab.

Baton Rouge's Medical Education and Innovation Center has a 100-seat lecture hall that divides into four rooms, a medical library and an 8,800-square-foot simulation center with three high-fidelity simulation labs. In New Orleans, the John P. Isché Library fills three floors of the Resource Center Building.

The Office of Student Affairs helps with academic and personal problems, and its deans are among those you can contact about clinical supervision or work hours. Its learning specialists offer 30- or 60-minute one-on-one appointments, in person or online, on study plans, test-taking, time management, test anxiety and Step preparation.

Second-years who earned Honors or High Pass in a first-year course can apply to tutor it through the Peer Tutoring Elective. The Student Government Association runs freshman peer groups, and Primary Care Programs students get primary care faculty mentors.

The free Campus Assistance Program offers counseling, with a counselor on call 24 hours a day, and the Student Health Clinic provides primary care and mental health help. Doctors who treat you play no part in grading you.

The Aesculapian Society, elected by each class, collects student evaluations of every required course and clerkship. If a weather emergency closes a campus, students on rotations there are excused. Those on rotations elsewhere with family or property in the area get up to 48 hours to deal with it.