The Morehouse School of Medicine MD program

Year 1 runs from July to May as one integrated curriculum. Its four units follow in sequence: Basic Principles of Human Biology from July to September, then Organ Systems I, II and III. Each Organ Systems unit teaches the anatomy, histology, embryology and physiology of a group of systems together, so you learn structure and function side by side.

The catalog lists lectures, gross anatomy lab, demonstrations, problem sessions, case-based teaching and self-directed study as the Organ Systems methods. The program mixes in-person skills sessions with live and self-paced online teaching, and the handbook expects you at in-person classes unless a course permits hybrid or virtual delivery.

Year 2 is organized as long courses: Pathophysiology, Pathology, Medical Microbiology and Immunology, and Medical Pharmacology and Toxicology. Fundamentals of Medicine runs beside the science in Years 1 to 3, covering clinical skills, communication, ethics, behavior and the health care system.

Anatomy is taught inside the first-year Organ Systems units, alongside histology, embryology and physiology. The 2026-27 catalog lists gross anatomy lab in Organ Systems I, which covers the back and upper limb, heart, lungs and gut. It also lists lab in Organ Systems II, which covers the kidneys, endocrine and reproductive systems, the pelvis and lower limb, and blood.

Organ Systems III, from March to May, covers the head, neck and nervous system. In its lab you study gross and microscopic sections of the brain and spinal cord, and the catalog says the head and neck are dissected. Teaching uses a dedicated gross anatomy laboratory; MSM opened a new lab in 2016, sized for nearly 115 students.

A fourth-year elective, Advanced Clinical Anatomy, takes you back to the lab. In the 2025-26 electives catalog, students spend at least five half-days a week dissecting and serving as teaching assistants in the Organ Systems courses.

Your first clinical experience comes through Fundamentals of Medicine I, a year-long first-year sequence. It combines a Clinical Preceptorship with Human Values, Human Behavior, and Epidemiology and Biostatistics, introducing primary care practice, core clinical skills and communication. Skills teaching comes before the preceptorship, which MSM's curriculum page places in physicians' offices and health clinics.

Human Behavior, taught by the psychiatry department, covers development across the lifespan, behavior change and motivational interviewing. It includes a smoking cessation clinical skills exercise and a communication skills field experience with older adults, both meant to build your interviewing.

In Year 2, Fundamentals of Medicine II adds individual patient assignments on the medical wards, backed by small-group sessions. Outside the curriculum, students volunteer with physicians at the student-run MSM H.E.A.L. (Health Equity for All Lives) Clinic. It offers free primary care on Saturday mornings at clinics on Howell Mill Road and Lee Street SW, plus a Wednesday evening telemedicine clinic.

Required courses carry letter grades rather than pass/fail. The handbook scale runs from A (90 to 100) through B and C to D (60 to 69) and F (below 60). A D is a failing grade: you must remediate it, and the remediated grade can only rise to a C.

The 2025-26 electives catalog gives letter grades for required clinical rotations and senior selectives but pass/fail for electives. MSM does not rank students for external purposes. In the clinical years, grades come with written comments, which the Associate Dean of Student Affairs uses to summarize your performance for residency programs.

The USMLE is the exam series state medical boards use in licensing decisions, and you must pass Step 1 and Step 2 CK to graduate. Step 1 has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. For MD students, enrollment in an LCME-accredited program is what makes you eligible to sit the USMLE. Students and graduates of osteopathic (DO) schools accredited by the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation, and of international schools that meet Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates requirements, qualify through other routes.

First-time takers without academic deficiencies sit Step 1 between June 1 and June 30 after Year 2, once they have shown readiness. You cannot start clerkships until you have sat it, and if you test after June 30 you need a recorded pass before starting a rotation. Step 2 CK opens after the third-year core clerkships and must be sat by December 31 of Year 4.

You must pass Step 1 within 12 months of finishing Year 2 and Step 2 CK within four months of finishing Year 4, with no more than three attempts at each. On the current schedule, a student entering in July 2027 would sit Step 1 in June 2029, and Step 2 CK between late June and December 31, 2030. This uses the 2026-27 calendar, the latest posted.

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 of a 2027 entrant's exams would fall after the change, and the handbook lets MSM's promotions committee modify its USMLE policies as circumstances change.

• Each clerkship sets a minimum passing score on its NBME subject (shelf) exam at or above the national 5th percentile, and you must pass the exam to pass the clerkship.
• In Year 3, OSCEs in obstetrics and gynecology and surgery are summative, while those in internal medicine, family medicine and psychiatry are formative, for feedback.
• The End of Year OSCE has 9 to 12 cases, one or two from each specialty, usually completed within eight hours. Clerkship faculty grade the patient note you write after each case, and students below the cut-off complete tailored remediation before graduating.
• Formal feedback comes at least at the midpoint of each course and clerkship, and on rotations you log every patient you see for a mid-cycle review.
• Faculty may also file a Scholastic Non-Cognitive Evaluation, rating professional qualities such as responsibility, ethics, communication and teamwork as outstanding, adequate or inadequate.
• The Student Academic Progress and Promotions (SAPP) Committee monitors every student's progress and assesses readiness for promotion and graduation. You have six years to finish the MD, excluding approved leave.

Third-year students complete most required clerkships at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, a major safety-net hospital serving a diverse, largely underserved population. The other core teaching affiliates are the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, at its Hughes Spalding and Scottish Rite hospitals.

Psychiatry rotations use Grady's outpatient mental health services, Ridgeview Institute, Georgia Regional Hospital, the Atlanta VA and New Horizons in Columbus. Family medicine trains through Morehouse Healthcare, MSM's faculty practice, with the Comprehensive Family Healthcare Center in East Point as a central site. The family medicine clerkship splits its clinical weeks between urban and rural settings, and MSM partners with Georgia's Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) on rural training.

Pediatrics centers on an ambulatory rotation in a private office, managed care office or hospital primary care clinic, including sites in Columbus, Georgia, Troy, Alabama, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. You also spend two inpatient weeks at a Children's Healthcare of Atlanta hospital or Studer Children's Hospital in Pensacola, Florida.

The 2026-27 handbook says students may be assigned to campuses outside metro Atlanta, by their choice when possible. Sometimes the only options are to accept the distant site or miss that cycle. Some experiences, such as neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) time in pediatrics in Albany, exist only there. The Columbus and Albany campuses offer dedicated student housing.

Through the More in Common Alliance (MiCA), a partnership between MSM and CommonSpirit Health, MD students also train at CommonSpirit sites in Chattanooga and the Seattle area. The 2025-26 electives catalog reaches further, with a family medicine sub-internship at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California, whose flights and lodging are covered.

Two hospitals are planned but not yet open. In August 2026, MSM and Atrium Health announced approval to move forward with plans for a teaching hospital at 675 Metropolitan Parkway SW. It is planned to open with about 50 beds, and the plans still depend on agreements with Fulton County. In March 2026, Fulton County commissioners approved a Grady hospital in Union City, with an amendment confirming that MSM students will train there. A media report reposted by MSM expects it to be fully operational in 2031 or 2032.

Electives start in Year 3 with the Career Exploration Elective. Before Year 3 ends you may take only one fourth-year elective for credit, a non-clinical one, though a longitudinal elective such as research can begin early.

Year 4 combines one Senior Selective with six electives, chosen with a clinical advisor, ideally an MSM faculty member in your intended field. A sub-internship, also called an acting internship, gives you much of the work of an intern, a first-year resident, under supervision. On the ward medicine sub-internship at Grady, you admit and take primary responsibility for three to five patients a week.

Electives can be at MSM, Emory University School of Medicine or any other LCME-accredited US medical school. The handbook allows up to two Emory electives, arranged by MSM rather than through the national Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) system. It allows up to five away electives, only one of them in person. MSM offers no two-week electives, but two related two-week electives elsewhere are allowed.

The 2025-26 electives catalog, the latest posted, spans every department. Examples include Health Equity Leadership Development, Law and Medicine with Georgia State University's health law partnership, forensic pathology in Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties, and Business of Medicine. Neurology and emergency medicine are offered as fourth-year electives, such as MEDI 838 Clinical Neurology and MEDI 887 Emergency Medicine.

International electives are possible in the senior year. Credit requires an experience affiliated with or sponsored by an LCME-accredited US school, or a four- or eight-week program with Child Family Health International (CFHI). The handbook advises going before March, and the 2025-26 catalog lists an integrative medicine elective in Chennai, India.

MEDI 881 Service Learning is a four-week, non-clinical elective built around a community service project with a faculty mentor. A committee of three, including your mentor, must approve your proposal at least a month ahead. For each month of credit, up to two, you log at least 100 hours, write a scholarly paper of 10 pages or more, present for at least 15 minutes and critique a related paper.

The MD-PhD, MSM's Medical Scientist Training Program (MSM-MSTP), aims to develop leaders in academic medicine and biomedical research who can advance health equity. You complete Years 1 and 2, start the PhD once you pass Step 1, then return for Years 3 and 4. Your preclinical MD courses count toward the PhD's core coursework, and tuition and a stipend are provided during the PhD.

You can apply at any point from acceptance to the MD through Year 3. MSM also works with the University of Washington in Seattle for a PhD there; candidates ideally apply before or during their first year and spend a summer at the site as part of applying.

The MD/MSCR adds a Master of Science in Clinical Research, open to MD students who have completed Year 2, with the MD program's approval. The master's requires 36 credit hours, 12 of them for a mentored research project that you propose with your mentor and present orally at the end.

The MD/MBA with Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business takes five years. After Years 1 to 3 at MSM, you take 39 credit hours of MBA courses at Scheller in the fourth year, then return to MSM for the final MD year. Fifteen MD credit hours count toward the 54-credit MBA. You apply before the end of Year 3, ideally in its fall.

Within the MD, MEDI 886 Research is a fourth-year elective of at least four weeks that any faculty member in any department can sponsor. A month before it starts, you and your mentor submit a proposal for approval by a committee of three. Research Day each February and a Neurology Research elective add further options.

MSM's Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine describes an Honors in Community Health and Service program, created in 2001, for faculty-recommended rising second-years with A grades in Community Health. Candidates spend three years on a community project overseen by MSM faculty and community representatives. Required service hours are 32 in Year 2, five in Year 3 and 100 in Year 4 linked to the service-learning elective. After an oral defense, those who complete the program are recognized at Class Day, in the Dean's letters to residency programs and at graduation.

Most preclinical teaching happens in the Hugh M. Gloster Basic Medical Sciences Building, a 91,000-square-foot building from 1982 with lecture halls for about 100 students, two multidisciplinary teaching labs and the gross anatomy lab. A 2018 to 2023 renovation added flexible classrooms, small-group rooms and carrel rooms for active and team-based learning.

The Clinical Skills and Simulation Center, in the National Center for Primary Care, covers more than 4,800 square feet. It has 11 examination rooms with audio and video recording, simulation rooms with high-fidelity mannequins, and equipment for practicing procedures such as IV access, lumbar puncture and suturing.

The Billye Suber Aaron Pavilion, added in 2017, provides over 10,000 square feet of study, group and recreation space. The M. Delmar Edwards, M.D. Library, in the Medical Education Building, is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Calvin Smyre Education Conference Center opened in 2025.

MSM started MD learning communities in 2011 as its classes grew. Each entering class is divided into 12 communities named for values such as Knowledge, Service, Equity and Discovery. You stay in yours for all four years, and its sessions are a required part of each year's Fundamentals of Medicine course.

Students lead the discussions, with two faculty mentors facilitating. Topics include ethics, health literacy, leadership, health reform, communication, implicit bias and conflict management.

The Office of Student Learning and Educational Resources (OSLER) offers peer tutoring, one-on-one learning specialists and workshop series, including Step 1 Prep. Weekly tutor-led Supplemental Instruction Sessions review pathology, pathophysiology and pharmacology for all second-year students. If you struggle, the Academic Coaching and Enrichment (ACE) program can provide a coach, an individual learning plan and NBME-style question practice.

The Office of Student Success handles preclinical advising and supports students at the regional campuses. Counseling Services offers confidential mental health support. Primary and behavioral health care comes from the Atlanta University Center Consortium Student Health and Wellness Center, on the third floor of MSM's Community Health and Wellness Center.