The Southern Illinois University School of Medicine MD program

In Years 1 and 2, each unit covers a group of organ systems. The sciences, from anatomy and biochemistry to pharmacology and population health, are learned through patient cases rather than separate discipline courses. Clinical skills run alongside, so while you study the heart, lungs and kidneys in Year 1 you also learn to take histories and examine those systems.

Year 1 cases focus on normal function and the mechanisms of disease. Doctoring, the clinical skills strand that runs through all four years, starts with normal history and examination findings. In Year 2, harder cases add pathology, microbiology, pharmacology and radiology, and Doctoring turns to abnormal findings, basic procedures, electronic health records and difficult conversations.

From Year 3, teaching moves to wards and clinics, where clerkship faculty stress direct observation and targeted feedback. The schedules say small-group case discussions of basic science continue through Years 3 and 4. Each Year 2 unit has a nurse educator, an experienced nurse who teaches clinical skills. Nurse educators also score some clerkship exams.

In Year 1 a case usually runs over three tutor-group sessions, according to the 2023-24 Year 1 overview. On day one the group reads the problem, suggests diagnoses and lists learning issues. On day two members report back and work further into the case, and on day three the group resolves it and gives each other feedback.

Between sessions you study on your own and attend resource sessions, anatomy and histology labs, clinical skills sessions and mentor visits. That edition set at least 8 mentor hours in the first unit and 12 in each of the others. In Year 2 in Springfield, small groups meet twice a week for two to three hours, alongside case-based and single-discipline sessions, radiology and clinical skills.

Anatomy is taught in Year 1 by the anatomy faculty in Carbondale, through gross, microscopic, neuro and developmental anatomy lectures and labs. Histology and gross anatomy labs run across all three units. Every unit's exams include a gross anatomy practical, with neuroanatomy practicals added in the neural unit.

The 2023-24 Year 1 overview, the most recent public edition, describes the labs as hands-on cadaver dissection in which every student is expected to take part. It asks you to treat your cadaver as your first patient. You follow lab guides alongside X-ray, CT and MRI images, discuss the clinical relevance of each body region, and have nearly unrestricted access to the lab for self-study.

The bodies come through SIU's Anatomical Gift Program, which says Lincoln Scholars also learn from donors. Each spring, first-year medical students help lead a memorial service honoring the donors, with their families invited. In Year 4 you can return for an elective in advanced neuro and gross anatomy dissection.

Your first patients are standardized patients, in the first week of Year 1. In clinical skills sessions you take their histories and practice examinations, from vital signs to heart, lung, abdominal and neurological exams, with faculty supervising.

The 2024-25 catalog says real patients follow in the fourth week, under a physician mentor. You generally keep that mentor all year. Clinical field experiences, such as observing an endoscopy, and elective clinical sessions with SIU faculty add more. When you move to Springfield for Year 2 you are paired with a physician preceptor instead.

Year 2 brings more supervised patient care: focused examinations, basic procedures and order writing. Full immersion starts with the Year 3 clerkships in July; Lincoln Scholars start theirs in Year 2.

Grading is pass/fail, with one transcript notation for each of Years 1 and 2. The school says students are not evaluated in competition with each other. Core clerkships are graded pass or fail on clinical skills and professionalism. Each clerkship evaluation also gives an overall RIME rating, which places you as a reporter, interpreter, manager or educator depending on how much of your patients' care you can take on. These evaluations feed the Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the letter the school sends to residency programs.

Year 1 exams come at the middle and end of each unit, though the last unit's midpoint tests clinical skills only. They include computer-based basic science exams, gross anatomy and histology practicals, and a Clinical Competency Examination (CCX). In a CCX you take a history from a standardized patient and examine them, then list findings, order and interpret tests and justify your diagnosis on a computer. Year 2 has end-of-unit exams and a CCX in every unit.

Each clerkship sets its own mix. In internal medicine, narrative comments from your clinical coaches make up half of the clinical grade, alongside a skills exam with standardized patients, ambulatory cases and EKG and chest X-ray reading. Pediatrics and psychiatry end with a CCX, and psychiatry adds a mental status exam you type in 15 minutes after watching a recorded interview. Neurology uses write-ups, case presentations and an observed exam, while surgery has no final exam and relies on faculty and resident comments.

During the Year 3 intersession you take the SCCX: 14 standardized patient cases testing reasoning, differential diagnosis, history and examination, management planning and communication. You must pass it to graduate, and failing it means a remediation course during the PEP.

The USMLE is the exam series state medical boards use in licensing doctors. Step 1 has been reported pass/fail only since January 26, 2022, and Step 2 CK tests clinical knowledge. SIU gives you six weeks of dedicated study for Step 1, which you must sit before starting clerkships and pass to graduate. You must also record a Step 2 score before graduating.

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. On the current schedule, a standard-track student entering in August 2027 would sit Step 1 between early May and early July 2029. Step 2 CK would follow around the end of Year 3, in spring or summer 2030. A 2027 Lincoln Scholar would take Step 1 by about December 2029 and Step 2 CK in early 2030.

• All of these dates fall after the switch, and they are projections from the latest schedules the school has posted: the Class of 2029, the 2026-27 year and the Lincoln Scholars Class of 2028.
• The 2023-24 Year 1 overview also lists objective structured clinical exams (OSCEs), short timed stations testing examination skills, after the first two units, and a final head-to-toe exam.
• The Longitudinal Performance Assessment, a multiple-choice test of clinical reasoning that SIU has used since 2005, opens each of your four years so your growth can be tracked.
• The LCME accredits MD programs in the United States. Its directory, updated October 14, 2026, lists SIU as fully accredited, first accredited in 1972, with its next survey in 2030-31.
• For MD students, attending an LCME-accredited school is what makes you eligible for Step 1 and Step 2 CK. Students at osteopathic (DO) schools, and at eligible schools outside the United States, qualify through other routes.

On the standard track you spend Year 1 at Lindegren Hall on the SIU Carbondale campus, then move to Springfield for Years 2 to 4. Springfield is a regional health care hub. The 2024-25 catalog says teaching there is based at SIU's clinics, Springfield Memorial Hospital (Memorial Medical Center, its former name), HSHS St. John's Hospital and other locations.

Emergency medicine runs shifts at Springfield Memorial and St. John's and at Memorial hospitals in Lincoln, Jacksonville and Taylorville. For family medicine you can choose a preceptor from a list of more than 160 board-certified family physicians in rural and urban practices across Illinois. You join in their office work, night call, and nursing home and home visits.

The school's March 2026 list names further affiliated hospitals, shown below. SIU also runs family medicine residencies in Springfield, Decatur, Quincy, Alton and Carbondale. The school says it has no on-campus housing for medical students in Springfield, so plan on finding your own.

Lincoln Scholars train in and around Carbondale, with clinical work in neighboring rural communities. Their program runs from a joint family medicine and physician assistant building on the Memorial Hospital campus. They can take electives in Springfield during the PEP and Year 4.

In the PEP at the end of Year 3 you must complete at least 12 of its 15 weeks, in full-time selectives of one to four weeks. All except medical humanities selectives are clinical. Options include cardiology, nephrology, critical care, inpatient obstetrics, gynecologic surgery and emergency medicine. Family medicine offers geriatrics, procedures, prompt care, hospitalist medicine and a rural experience.

Longitudinal selectives meet one afternoon a week for 5, 10 or 15 weeks. You can design your own clinical selective, as long as it is within SIU. The Year 3 policies allow no away rotations, meaning rotations at other institutions, during the PEP. The PEP is also when any deferred clerkship or remediation is made up.

You plan Year 4 with an Elective Advisor you choose by early April of Year 3, and electives can be full-time or half-time. One is the emergency medicine sub-intensive, which gives you primary responsibility for emergency patients and suits students seeking a standardized letter of evaluation for residency. Obstetrics electives range from maternal-fetal medicine to a residency readiness boot camp.

If you are in good academic standing, you can take extramural electives at other LCME-accredited schools, or design your own with non-SIU faculty or in military or other health care settings. At least 20 of your 30 elective weeks must stay under SIU faculty. Electives abroad need a meeting with the Associate Dean for Student Affairs at least six weeks ahead.

The six-year MD/JD, run with SIU Simmons Law School, starts with two years of law school in Carbondale, including two summer sessions and a concentration in health law. You then take Year 1 of medicine in Carbondale and Years 2 and 3 in Springfield. In your final year, a 14-week set of law, medicine and health policy electives counts toward both degrees.

The five-year MD/MPH, run with SIU Carbondale, opens with three semesters of public health before Year 1 of medicine in Carbondale and three more years in Springfield, the last combining both degrees. It is open only to students already accepted to the MD, before they start. The 2024-25 catalog says three are admitted a year. Year 4 includes 15 weeks of public health electives, among them a six-week practicum in a community agency.

In the summer after Year 1 you can apply for the MPEE, an optional eight-week research project of roughly 40 hours a week. You design it with a faculty mentor, work in Carbondale, Springfield or another approved site, and present it at the school's trainee research symposium in Year 2.

The optional Research Scholars Pathway adds four years of mentored research: summer research after Year 1, an abstract presented in each later year and six weeks of research electives in Year 4. Completing it is noted in your residency application and your MSPE. If you want a research degree as well as the MD, the student handbook directs you to the Associate Dean for Student Affairs.

The Medical Education Pathway builds a teaching portfolio across all four years and requires a peer-reviewed presentation or publication plus 8 weeks of medical education electives in Year 4. When you complete it, your residency application lists you as an SIU Medical Education Scholar. Other pathways cover the humanities (HEALER Scholars), health advocacy, leadership development and interprofessional complex care, in which student teams support patients with complex needs from September to March.

In Carbondale, Year 1 is based in Lindegren Hall, home to the tutor rooms, the gross anatomy and histology labs, and the Medical Resource Center. That library serves medical and physician assistant students, among others, lending books, microscopes, slides, models and laptops. SIU Carbondale's main Morris Library is next door.

In Springfield, Year 2 tutor rooms, the student lounge and a computer lab are in the 801 N. Rutledge building, with the Medical Library on its fourth floor. Students have round-the-clock access to the library's main collaborative space. The school's Professional Development Laboratory has eight examination rooms around a central observation room, where faculty watch standardized and real patient encounters through one-way glass, with a computer lab next door.

The Memorial Center for Learning and Innovation, also called the Memorial Learning Center, is a 72,000-square-foot Springfield building with a medical simulation center and the J. Roland Folse, MD, Surgical Skills Laboratory. The neurology clerkship starts there with practice in a simulated patient care room. The Department of Medical Humanities also runs the Pearson Museum of medical history, housed since 1977 at 801 N. Rutledge in space designed as a teaching museum.

In Year 1 you have a faculty advisor, whom the 2023-24 overview says you meet after every unit. In Year 3 you meet an assigned Year Three Advisor monthly during the clerkships. Peer mentoring pairs first-year students with third-years and second-years with fourth-years.

The Office of Student Affairs runs a four-year career planning program based on Careers in Medicine, from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association. It covers budgeting, specialty choice, USMLE and Match planning, and a review of your MSPE. Lincoln Scholars also have retreats on self-care, group dynamics and community involvement.

In Springfield, student primary care is at the SIU Center for Family Medicine, and confidential mental health care comes through the SIU Behavioral Health Program. Their providers play no part in assessing you. All students get free, round-the-clock virtual medical and mental health care through TimelyCare. Disability accommodations are arranged through a confidential Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) representative.