The NYU Grossman School of Medicine MD program

Stage one is built from interdisciplinary modules rather than separate subject courses. In Organ Systems, for example, each block covers one system's physiology, pathology and disease mechanisms together, and shows how disease in one system affects the others. The school describes its teaching as patient-centered and disease-focused, linking classroom science to real clinical problems.

Clinical skills are taught alongside the science, not after it. The Foundational Clinical Skills module runs all year, joining class and lab topics to bedside sessions on diagnosis, clinical reasoning and communication. One student profile on the school's site describes studying how cystic fibrosis damages the body and then working with a patient who has it.

From year 2 the setting moves to the wards. The school says daily patient contact, online and simulation exercises at NYSIM, the New York Simulation Center for the Health Sciences, and progress assessments reinforce the science from then on. Two short Integrated Clinical Skills sessions break up the clerkship year, and stage three adds an Advanced Clinical Skills module from July to May.

Gross anatomy, the study of the body's structures, is taught in Living Anatomy. It runs from mid-September to mid-October of year 1, and the radiology department describes it as four weeks long. The module moves through the body's regions and systems, linking each structure to how it develops in the embryo and how it appears on medical imaging.

Current school pages say students learn gross anatomy without dissecting human cadavers. Instead you study photorealistic scanned cadavers and specimens and digital atlases, handle 3D-printed models of difficult structures, and work through virtual and augmented reality exercises built by faculty. Radiologists supply CT and MRI images and 3D renderings, and NYU Langone surgeons lecture on how they use anatomy.

You get access to PACS, the picture archiving and communication system clinicians use to view scans, and radiology-based tasks tie imaging findings to the anatomy covered in lab. Formative case discussions, which give feedback without counting toward a grade, apply each region to clinical problems.

Dissection survives as an option. The Office of Medical Education runs a two-week Clinical Anatomy Dissection elective in March, April and May, with eight places per period. A two-week Anatomy Lab Teaching Assistantship in October takes four students at a time. A 2019 school article, written as the change began, said some cadavers were kept for demonstration and plastinated specimens, preserved with plastic resins, were added.

Your first patient contact comes in year 1, in the bedside sessions of the Foundational Clinical Skills module, which runs through the whole preclerkship year. Teaching stresses care that responds to each patient's needs, preferences and values.

Psychiatry adds early time on the wards. During Brain and Behavior, supervised small groups visit inpatient psychiatry units at Bellevue, NYU Langone and the VA NY Harbor Healthcare System, months before clerkships begin. There you practice psychiatric interviewing, history taking, the assessment of psychiatric symptoms and the mental status examination, a structured check of mood, thinking and behavior. Psychiatry residents also lead small-group patient interviews.

Full-time clinical work starts with the clerkship year in August of year 2, after a one-week Transition to Clerkships course on what a medical team expects of you. Responsibility then builds. In stage three you take an acting internship, a senior rotation at close to intern level, where you may take overnight call, admit patients and enter orders.

Stage one modules and general electives are graded pass/fail. Required clerkships, advanced electives and the scholarly project are graded honors, high pass, pass or fail. Your faculty advisor also guides an academic portfolio, a self-assessment of your foundational knowledge, clinical skills, professional development and research.

A clerkship grade combines supervisor ratings of knowledge, skills and professionalism, assignments such as patient write-ups, an end-of-clerkship OSCE and the shelf exam. An OSCE, or objective structured clinical examination, is a circuit of timed stations, each testing one task, often with a standardized patient. Each shelf has 110 questions in 2 hours 45 minutes and counts for 10% of the grade. You must pass it, and a first failure rules out honors.

The USMLE is the three-step exam series for a US medical license, and LCME accreditation is what makes you eligible to sit it as an MD student here. Step 1 tests basic science applied to medicine and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. Step 2 CK tests clinical knowledge and still receives a three-digit score.

School pages say all students take Step 1 and Step 2 CK after completing the clerkship curriculum. If you take a Plus One year, you sit both before it; the dual-degree timelines show the USMLE in the summer after year 2. The 2025-26 clerkship schedules also let students, with approval, use a clerkship-year block for Step 1.

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, a student entering in July 2027 would finish clerkships in May 2029 and sit both Steps from about June 2029, so both would normally fall under the new model. If the school still lets students use a clerkship-year block for Step 1, as the 2025-26 schedules did, a Step 1 taken there before January 2029 would come under today's year-round testing.

The registration office warns that Step 2 CK scores can take up to three months to arrive. It advises booking the exam early enough in your final year that the scores are back in time for graduation requirements.

• Surgery: written evaluations from attendings and senior residents make up 45% of the grade, alongside an OSCE and the shelf. A senior or chief resident gives ungraded feedback halfway through the inpatient weeks.
• Psychiatry: a psychopharmacology exam, a clinical reasoning exam, an OSCE and the NBME psychiatry subject exam.
• Pediatrics: a half-day OSCE, with preceptor feedback at the middle and end of the clerkship.
• Comprehensive Clinical Skills Examination: mock patient encounters at the end of the clerkship year, testing communication, history taking, physical examination and clinical reasoning. The 2025-26 schedules gave each student one half-day in early June.
• The satisfactory academic progress policy for financial aid, revised in June 2026, expects credit in 75% of attempted modules and rotations each year. Three-year students must finish within four and a half years.

The school describes its clinical training as spanning public, private and government health care: NYU Langone's own hospitals, the city's NYC Health + Hospitals system and the VA NY Harbor Healthcare System. The main sites sit close together on Manhattan's East Side.

Department pages show where each clerkship runs. Surgery uses Kimmel Pavilion, Bellevue and NYU Langone Hospital—Brooklyn, with four weeks on an inpatient service and two on an integrated surgical experience. Neurology is at Tisch Hospital or Bellevue, split evenly between inpatient and outpatient care, and obstetrics and gynecology uses Bellevue, Tisch and the Brooklyn hospital.

Pediatrics spends three weeks on inpatient units at Hassenfeld Children's Hospital, Bellevue or the Brooklyn hospital. There is also a week in a low-risk newborn nursery at Bellevue or Tisch and a week in primary care clinics at Bellevue, Gouverneur and affiliated private practices. Psychiatry places you on inpatient units at NYU Langone, Bellevue or the VA, with adult and adolescent services.

NYU Langone Hospital—Brooklyn is the only core site outside Manhattan named on the clerkship pages. The school's site list also includes NYU Langone Hospital—Long Island, a 591-bed hospital in Mineola.

Electives are two- to four-week courses you choose yourself, taken in the clerkship year and after it. The curriculum requires at least 24 weeks of them, and eight of those weeks must be in clinical areas unrelated to your expected specialty, so you sample other fields before residency. General electives are pass/fail; advanced electives are graded honors to fail.

The catalog covers 24 clinical areas, from anesthesiology, dermatology and emergency medicine to forensic medicine, gross anatomy, radiation oncology and urology. With a faculty mentor and approval from the associate dean for curriculum, you can design an individual preceptorship, research or service-learning elective. Places are allocated by lottery twice a year, and you can drop or change an elective up to 45 days before it starts.

Away electives, often called away rotations, are electives at another US medical school or teaching hospital. At schools accredited by the LCME or the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation (COCA), you apply through VSLO, the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities service run by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Elsewhere you apply directly.

Some departments run selectives and their own electives. Radiology's four-week selective pairs mornings on the clinical service with afternoon teaching, and two-week radiology electives follow for students who have taken it. Psychiatry's electives and advanced electives usually last four weeks, in areas such as consultation-liaison, addiction and forensic psychiatry.

Global Health Initiatives, whose International Health Program dates from 2002, supports work abroad. Research projects abroad need at least six weeks in the field, often in the summer after year 1. Clinical electives abroad need approval for credit, at least 35 hours a week and an application three months ahead, and only research electives abroad can be funded. A global health concentration adds a four-week global health selective, eight weeks of field research and a scholarly project.

Every student does mentored research through the Areas of Concentration, a research program that runs across the curriculum. Its five areas are biomolecular medicine; clinical and translational research; healthcare innovations and health systems science; data-driven medicine and technology; and population, global health and public policy. Its two core parts are the Summer Research Fellowship after year 1 and a scholarly project later on.

On the three-year track the scholarly project is eight weeks of research ending in a research report, and a first-author publication can add Research Distinction. Afterward you assess how the project built your professionalism, literature reading, hypothesis and study design, and technical skills such as data analysis. Some department pages still describe a 12-week scholarly concentration, a length the Areas of Concentration page gives for the four-year track of the Classes of 2025 and 2026.

The Plus One year goes further. In a dual degree, your master's capstone counts as the scholarly project. A research year means 9 to 12 months of research and a written manuscript draft. Either track lets you apply for honors with an oral defense, and the MD with honors, which dates from 1957, is open only through these Plus One tracks.

The six master's degrees differ in size. The MBA has 51 credits, the MPA 45, the MPH 40, the MS in biomedical informatics 34, the MA in bioethics 32 and the MS in clinical investigation 31. Some medical school credits count toward the MPA and the MBA, and the MBA waives the GMAT or GRE for dual-degree applicants.

The tuition scholarship covers only the years you are a full-time MD student. In master's semesters the graduate school charges its own tuition, and research years are not covered.

For physician-scientists, the MD/PhD runs through the Vilcek Institute as a Medical Scientist Training Program recognized by the National Institutes of Health. You take Step 1 and Step 2 CK before starting graduate school. The school's MD/PhD program dates from 1964.

The Medical Science Building at 550 First Avenue holds the Office of Medical Education, the registration office and, on its ground floor, the Sid and Ruth Lapidus Health Sciences Library. The school also lists the Science Building, the Joan and Joel Smilow Research Center and the Martin Kahn Teaching and Learning Center among its centers of education and research.

NYSIM is a 25,000-square-foot simulation center on the third floor of Bellevue Hospital, run jointly with the City University of New York (CUNY). Its own site reports more than 50,000 learner visits since it opened in September 2011, from NYU and CUNY medical, nursing and dental programs and others. OSCE sessions there are recorded in its learning system so videos can be reviewed afterward.

The Institute for Innovations in Medical Education, founded in 2013 and now staffed by more than 30 people full time, builds digital tools for teaching, including Living Anatomy's 3D and virtual reality content. A Winter 2025 school article describes the school's Precision Education approach: AI-based tools, diagnostic practice with algorithms built on de-identified patient data, and an app that lets you shadow faculty in any specialty.

Housing is close by. NYU Langone says its student housing is near the medical center on Manhattan's East Side, and single students are guaranteed housing when they first enroll. MD students are eligible for Jan and Marica Vilcek Hall at 334 East 26th Street, with shared two- or four-bedroom suites and studios, and a spring lottery handles moves for the following year.

Advising runs through the Violet Society Program, the school's version of learning communities: advisory groups that stay with you from orientation to graduation. At orientation you are randomly assigned to one of four societies and to one of its three faculty advisors, whose advisor group mixes students from every class year.

You meet your advisor one-on-one several times a year. Advisors hold no administrative posts and do not assess students. They guide your academic portfolio and specialty choice, and later work with departmental advisors in your intended field on your residency application. Each advisor group has two final-year peer mentors, each leading a smaller family of students.

The Office of Student Affairs runs career advising, wellness programs, academic events and student life. The Student Health Service at 334 East 25th Street gives free primary care, apart from some immunizations, from clinicians who play no part in teaching or grading. Its mental health service offers free, confidential short-term counseling, medication management and group therapy, with referrals for longer-term care.

Outside the curriculum, the Humanistic Medicine Program runs noncredit seminars, the arts and literature magazine Agora and mock clinical ethics workshops, and offers humanities or bioethics projects as a Summer Research Fellowship.