The Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine MD program

Pre-clerkship teaching is organized into blocks, the school's name for its courses. The first six cover the foundational sciences. The organ-system courses that follow integrate anatomy, physiology and pathology, so you learn how an organ is built, works and fails in the same course. Faculty combine lectures with active learning. The M.D.-Ph.D. program's account of this shared curriculum says it aims to cut lecture time in favor of laboratory, small-group and problem-based work, while keeping some required lectures.

Formats vary by course. A typical immunology day pairs a micro-lecture with a board-question session and worksheets, while the renal course mixes lectures with small-group teaching, small-group reflections and bedside teaching.

Anatomy is one of the foundational science courses in the first six blocks, and the Mayo Clinic Libraries list it as a first-year course. The school designs it around active, team-based learning on a hybrid platform: live remote teaching, pre-recorded sessions, and guided, self-directed sessions in the lab. The M.D.-Ph.D. program's Arizona page says the medical curriculum is the same on the Arizona and Minnesota campuses.

A June 2025 Mayo Clinic Alumni magazine article describes how the course works now. Mayo no longer uses novice-led dissection, in which beginners dissect a donor body themselves over a few weeks. Instead, first-year anatomy is learner-driven and based on prosections: donor bodies already dissected by experts, so the structures are ready to study.

In the clinical anatomy studio, instructors teach and dissect while camera specialists project close-up views onto large screens, so every student sees the same structures. Sessions are recorded to rewatch or to view in a virtual reality headset, and the department also teaches with ultrasound and 3D-printed models.

After the first-year course, the article says, you can take an anatomy selective using prosected donors, and students heading for specialties that rely on anatomy can take a fourth-year elective focused on their field. Students who want more dissection can serve as teaching assistants.

The school's current enrichment catalog offers hands-on cadaveric dissection as a Minnesota selective, Anatomy Dissection: A Hands-on Team Based Approach, for students who have completed the year 1 anatomy course. It lasts one to two weeks. In Arizona, the catalog's Advanced Clinical Anatomy selective has students work through clinical cases by self-directed learning and peer teaching. Arizona's campus pages, written for all its learners including residents and fellows, say the 1,600-square-foot gross anatomy lab in the Scottsdale school building supports hands-on anatomy and dissection training.

Clinical training starts as soon as you matriculate. Longitudinal clinical skills courses teach interviewing, history taking and physical examination across the Pre-Clerkship phase. You also evaluate patients under a preceptor in internal medicine and pediatrics, and the faculty page says you work with patients in a clinical setting from day one.

Clinic time follows the classroom. For example, you see dialysis patients while learning about the renal system, and during the circulation block you practice cardiac assessment on Harvey at the Mayo Clinic Multidisciplinary Simulation Centers. The M.D.-Ph.D. program describes several half-days a week in the shared curriculum spent seeing patients in the specialty of the current organ block.

Some courses bring patients into the teaching too: hematology can include patient interactions after a lecture, and the renal course includes bedside teaching. Service starts early as well. First-year students are introduced to local community organizations, and second-year students work in community health clinics.

The Choosing Mayo Clinic page, updated in June 2026, describes the programs as non-competitive and pass/fail, which the school says lets students focus on their well-being rather than class rank. Mayo's transcript key, revised in October 2020 and still online, differs for clerkships. It grades years 1 and 2 Pass, Pass with Remediation or Fail, but required clerkships in years 3 and 4 Honors, High Pass, Pass, Pass with Remediation or Fail. The key labels grades by years 1-2 and 3-4, a split that predates the current 18-month pre-clerkship phase.

The United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) is the national licensing exam series. Students and graduates of LCME-accredited M.D. programs are among those eligible to take it. Step 1 tests the sciences basic to medicine, and results have been reported only as pass or fail for exams taken from January 26, 2022. The pre-clerkship page says the school provides dedicated study time for Step 1 during the final six months of year two.

Step 2 CK (Clinical Knowledge) tests how you apply clinical knowledge to patient care under supervision. The school's academic progress policy, effective October 2025, lists passing both Step 1 and Step 2 CK among the things it monitors, under a separate school policy on the exams. In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. On the current schedule, students entering in 2027 would sit Step 1 and Step 2 CK under that model, so the school's timing may change.

The M.D.-Ph.D. program's curriculum page, which describes the M.D. clerkships its students also take, says you must pass a shelf exam after a clerkship. Shelf exams are subject exams from the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), which says they are typically used at the end of third-year clerkships.

A committee called SPARC, the Student Promotion and Assessment Review Committee, reviews every student's progress twice a year and as needed. The school monitors grades, performance assessments, timely completion of longitudinal requirements and professional behavior. The academic progress policy expects you to finish in four years, with up to two extra years for personal or medical leave, six in total. Time for an academic leave, such as a dual degree, needs separate approval.

In Arizona, the school building has six rooms dedicated to Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs). These are timed clinical skills exams in which you rotate through stations, each testing one task, often with a standardized patient. Arizona's Simulation Exam Suites also host clinical examinations and patient simulations.

Where you train depends on your campus track. On the four-year tracks, Arizona or Minnesota is your home base for the whole program. On the Arizona/Florida and Minnesota/Florida tracks, you complete pre-clerkship coursework in Arizona or Minnesota, then do your clerkships and post-clerkship year in Jacksonville. When you apply, you rank the tracks you want, and an offer can be for any track you selected.

The Training Locations page lists up to 50 places a year in each four-year program and up to 12 on the Florida campus. The class profile says the first-year class that started in 2026 had 50 students in Phoenix/Scottsdale and 55 in Rochester, counting M.D.-Ph.D. and Florida-track students. Twelve of them will move to Jacksonville after about a year and a half.

The campuses are linked. The Training Locations page says students can choose where to complete certain parts of the curriculum, from selectives and clinical electives to core clerkship rotations and research. It encourages every student to use all three campuses.

Getting around differs by campus. Rochester's downtown buildings are linked by pedestrian subways and skyways, with a free shuttle to Saint Marys, 10 blocks west. In Arizona, Mayo's Scottsdale and Phoenix sites are 14 miles apart, joined by a weekday shuttle every half hour, and students get free Valley Metro bus and light rail access. In Jacksonville most people drive.

Housing is your own arrangement. The Rochester, Arizona and Jacksonville campus pages say the college has no student housing, though each offers help with finding somewhere to live.

Selectives are self-directed blocks. Most entries in the online catalog run one to two weeks; others last three to eight weeks or run longitudinally alongside your courses. You can use them to explore careers, work with underserved communities, start research or build clinical skills, choosing from Mayo's list or proposing your own.

Selectives can take place on any Mayo campus, in Mayo Clinic Health System or at other US and international centers, and the catalog differs by campus. Arizona lists Native health service at the Chinle Service Unit and Phoenix Indian Medical Center, Street Medicine Phoenix and space medicine. Minnesota lists Street Medicine, Rural Medicine, a student-run free clinic and emergency medical technician (EMT) training. Florida lists trauma surgery, transplant and Northeast Florida Community Medicine.

Distinction tracks, which the school calls less demanding than certificate programs, let you concentrate in one field. The catalog lists tracks in Biomedical Ethics, Applied Medical and Health Humanities, and Medical Spanish for advanced or native speakers, plus the Global Health Equity Scholars Program.

For global health, the Mayo Clinic Global Health Scholars program, formerly the Mayo International Health Program, arranges mentored rotations with underserved populations abroad. The catalog also lists medical and surgical trips to the Dominican Republic and rotations in women's health and primary care at the University of Oxford. Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Paracelsus Medical University in Austria offer research or clinical stays of three weeks or more.

In the final year you take 16 weeks of clinical electives on any Mayo campus or at other US and international centers; electives at another institution are known as away rotations. The published lists span surgical fields, pediatrics, internal medicine subspecialties and general options such as aerospace medicine, dermatology and radiology. The school says many students choose an international or underserved-population elective.

The Community Physician Apprenticeship Program (CPAP) is an optional 12-week fourth-year elective for students interested in rural primary care, run with Mayo Clinic's Department of Family Medicine in Rochester and Mayo Clinic Health System. It places you in a Health System community outside Rochester, working in its clinics and hospital with a physician mentor. You follow patients through their care with a team of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, therapists, social workers and nurses, and complete a community health project. Its 12 weeks count for 12 of the 16 required elective weeks.

Dual degrees are taken during the M.D., and all applications are made after you enroll. Students who have completed two or three years of the program in good standing are eligible for a degree-granting enrichment. Partners include the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and ASU, and the academic progress policy allows time away for an approved academic leave of absence.

The lists differ by page. The enrichment catalog names master's options in Artificial Intelligence in Health Care, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Clinical and Translational Science, Immunology, Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and Virology and Gene Therapy. It also lists Health Care Administration and Policy, Health Informatics, Mass Communication and a J.D., the US law degree. The Academic Enrichments page features a Health System Science (M.S.) and the J.D. from ASU's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

The Mayo Clinic ASU Alliance page lists six ASU pairings with the M.D.: health care administration and policy, health informatics, biomedical diagnostics, mass communication, business administration and law. It says the M.D./M.B.A. is structured to be completed in five years. In flyers from 2020, the M.D./J.D. could be completed in six years, with two years at ASU Law, and the informatics and diagnostics master's were taken online in a third year.

The M.D.-Ph.D. program, for future physician-scientists, has its own admission. Its pages say it admits up to nine students a year in Minnesota, where it began in 1986 and has been a National Institutes of Health-funded Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) since 2003. They give two a year in Arizona, where the first class enrolled in 2021.

M.D.-Ph.D. students start with a month-long lab rotation the summer before medical school, then complete the Pre-Clerkship phase. Depending on the plan, they move straight to Ph.D. research, take one or two clerkships first, or finish three years of medical school first. Research runs in one of eight graduate tracks, and a re-entry program then eases students into about 18 months of clinical training. The program reports an average of 8.06 years to both degrees.

Within the M.D., the enrichment page sets out a research route. If you take this route, you learn hypothesis-driven methods and statistics, review the literature, write a proposal, complete the study under a Mayo investigator, present it at a meeting and write a paper. Students can draw on more than 6 million medical histories and research core facilities. The M.D. program page says more than 80% of students graduate with a published article in a peer-reviewed journal.

In Rochester, the school is based in the Mitchell Student Center, with study space and resources for medical students. The Siebens Building houses the Venables Health Sciences Library, and the historic Plummer Building holds the Plummer Library. Simulation training runs at the Multidisciplinary Simulation Center in the Stabile Building and at the Procedural Skills Mastery Lab at Saint Marys; the center's 2022 page describes about 100 standardized patient actors.

Arizona's school building in Scottsdale, opened in 2017, holds the gross anatomy lab, breakout rooms, a student lounge and study space, plus academic success counselors and mental health clinicians. In Phoenix, Mayo Clinic Hospital houses the Multidisciplinary Simulation Center, with SimMan 3G and Hal patient simulators. The campus also lists the Ayarza Laparoscopic Skills Lab, open 24/7, a Sectra digital anatomy table and virtual reality headsets.

In Jacksonville, the Stabile Buildings hold a library, student lounge space and the J. Wayne and Delores Barr Weaver Simulation Center, accredited by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. Its 2024 page describes replica clinical rooms, a standardized patient program and equipment including an Anatomage virtual dissection table, a Harvey simulator and a da Vinci robotic virtual reality trainer.

Mentoring starts in your first week, when you join a MedSib family: one medical student from each year plus a faculty member. Students turn to them for study tips, what to expect in a course and time management. You are also paired with a faculty mentor from day one, and every first-year student is matched with a specialty career adviser who guides career planning through all four years. The school reports more than 800 full-time faculty, about three for every student.

Academic Learning Specialists help with learning strategies, time management, test-taking and board exam preparation, one-to-one, in small groups or in workshops, for students on every campus. Peer tutoring is free and covers subjects such as anatomy, biochemistry, histology, microbiology and USMLE Step 1. Disability Access Services arranges reasonable academic accommodations.

All learners can see licensed Mayo Clinic counselors through the Office of Wellness and Academic Support, or use WellConnect, an external learner assistance program available 24/7. A Student-initiated Wellness Activity grant funds events students organize, from a kickball league to a painting night.