The Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University MD program

LEARN makes you responsible for your own learning, with faculty acting as facilitators and mentors who recommend resources. The school's 2025 newsletter calls this a flipped classroom: you learn content on your own, then apply it in class. The hardest concepts are meant to be taught actively, through team-based, problem-based or case-based learning, simulations, labs and clinical pathologic conferences, case sessions that link a patient's clinical story to the disease found. The welcome message from the vice dean in charge of the MD program says the curriculum uses iPads and brings bedside ultrasound training and artificial intelligence into your learning.

After the four Biomedical Building Blocks courses, each Integrated Pathophysiology course takes one group of organs and teaches its physiology, disease, histology and drug treatment together. You practice reading patient histories, test results and treatment choices for that system.

Three longitudinal courses run through Phase I. Introduction to Clinical Medicine teaches clinical skills, Medicine in Contemporary Society covers ethics and the experience of illness, and Themes in Medical Education ties science to themes of patient care. The social determinants of health, the conditions in which people live and work that shape their health, are threaded through these courses. Through the Center for Interprofessional Innovation you also learn alongside nursing, dental, social welfare, health professions and public health students.

From Phase II you learn on hospital and clinic teams, following patients, presenting them on rounds and joining conferences and teaching sessions. Electronic cases and materials add to what you see on the wards.

In Phase I, the school's work-hours policy caps instructor-led teaching at five hours a day and 25 a week, generally scheduled from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 3 p.m. Teaching plus assigned independent work, such as readings, recorded lectures and homework, is capped at 50 hours a week. You also get five hours of scheduled review time in the 24 hours before each unit, midterm or final exam.

Year 1 has a one-week spring break in mid-March. Phase III has no scheduled winter or spring break: the 2025-26 calendar gave eight holidays off instead, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. From the clerkships on, the school follows the limits the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) sets for residents. That means no more than 80 hours a week averaged over four weeks, shifts of 24 hours at most, eight hours off between shifts and one day in seven free.

Anatomy is taught by cadaveric dissection in The Body, a required 14-week course from August to November of year 1. The anatomy department describes it as lecture and lab work centered on dissection of the entire human body, covering functional and topographic anatomy, clinical correlations and an introduction to radiology.

You work region by region, studying every aspect of one part of the body before moving on and focusing on where structures lie in relation to each other. That matters clinically, because closeness shapes how infection and cancer spread and which complications follow an injury. Lectures, some team-based learning sessions, imaging and digital media support the lab.

You dissect in the Gabor Inke Anatomy Laboratory, renovated in 2007 and later fitted with digital dissection guides and high-definition monitors. It is shared with students from the School of Dental Medicine and the School of Health Technology and Management, more than 300 a year in all.

The bodies come through a body donation program that has supported dissection-based teaching for over 40 years and accepts donors from Long Island and New York City. Medical and dental students host an annual Donor Remembrance Ceremony. Taking photographs of donors with no educational purpose is unprofessional behavior that is referred to the Committee on Academic and Professional Progress (CAPP).

Anatomy returns in the organ-system courses, such as the anatomy and embryology of the heart, lungs and kidneys in Cardiovascular/Pulmonary/Renal.

Your first patient encounters come in Transition to Medical School, the eight-day opening course, in sessions with standardized patients and patients-as-teachers, patients who help with teaching.

Introduction to Clinical Medicine teaches interviewing, examination, clinical reasoning, documentation and case presentation. You practice on standardized patients, learn telehealth and ultrasound, and have bedside teaching with clinical preceptors, and every Phase I clinical experience is directly supervised. Themes in Medical Education adds longitudinal family cases, patient presentations and site visits.

Outside the curriculum you can volunteer at the Stony Brook Health Outreach and Medical Education (SB HOME) clinic, which offers free care to underserved people in Suffolk County. The school lists early clinical exposure and working alongside attending physicians among the benefits.

Full-time clinical work begins in January of year 2. Sensitive examinations and procedures needing extra patient consent are always directly supervised; others may be done under indirect supervision when your supervising physician judges you ready.

Every Phase I course is pass/fail. In the foundational and organ-system courses you need an overall score of at least 70, and any unit or final exam below 70 must be remediated. Unit exams are in-house or customized NBME exams; the NBME co-sponsors the USMLE with the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB).

Exams make up no more than 60 percent of a course grade. Quizzes and midterms are formative: they give you feedback, and a low score need not be made up. Small-group facilitators in the three longitudinal courses also write narrative comments that go into your MSPE.

You must pass the Introduction to Clinical Medicine final OSCE, remediating by the end of the first clerkship block if needed, and the CPX in the last clerkship block. Clerkship OSCEs are held in the Clinical Simulation Center.

Core clerkships are graded Honors, High Pass, Pass, Low Pass or Fail. Clinical performance counts for 40 to 60 percent, the shelf exam for 20 to 30 percent and other assignments for 10 to 30 percent. You need the 5th national percentile on the shelf exam to pass and the 50th to be eligible for Honors. Honors and High Pass are each meant for no more than 30 percent of the class.

Step 1 tests the sciences behind medical practice and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. Step 2 CK tests the clinical knowledge needed for supervised patient care and still gets a three-digit score. LCME accreditation makes the school's students eligible to sit the USMLE, and you must pass both exams to graduate. You sit Step 1 within 12 weeks of finishing the last clerkship block, before any Phase III course, and Step 2 CK by August 1 of Phase III.

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, projected from the school's USMLE policy effective April 10, 2026, an August 2027 entrant would start clerkships in January 2029. Step 1 would then be due by early April 2030, at the end of a 12-week study period from mid-January, about a year after the switch, and Step 2 CK by August 1, 2030.

• Mini-clerkships, transition courses, the Selective, the Advanced Clinical Experience and two-week electives are pass/fail; sub-internships and four-week clinical electives use the five tiers.
• A failed first shelf attempt gives a temporary Z grade, and passing the retake caps that clerkship at Pass.
• Many students take Step 2 CK in the same 12-week block, as the school strongly recommends; others take four weeks for it in the summer of Phase III.
• MD/PhD students take Step 1 after Phase I and before the PhD; 3YMD students take both exams within 10 weeks of finishing Phase II.
• Missing a Step deadline means a mandatory leave of absence noted on your transcript and MSPE.

Stony Brook University Hospital is the main teaching hospital and hosted every clerkship in the 2025-26 calendar; the emergency medicine mini-clerkship runs only there. That year internal medicine also used Mather Hospital, Nassau University Medical Center (NUMC) and the Northport Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center, and surgery used NUMC and Northport. Psychiatry used NUMC, primary care used Northport and Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, and obstetrics and gynecology used NUMC, Mount Sinai South Nassau and Southampton.

In the Primary Care Clerkship you join a family physician, general internist or geriatrician in practice, from office visits and hospital rounds to nursing home and home visits. Neurology also uses affiliated community practices.

Sites are assigned by lottery and are generally within a 45-mile commute of the Stony Brook campus. You can ask the Associate Dean for Student Affairs for another site if extenuating circumstances affect you, and a disability that makes a commute unduly difficult can be grounds for reassignment.

You arrange and pay for your own transport, including fuel, tolls and parking. Without an approved accommodation, transport problems are not accepted as an excuse for lateness. The school's housing page says a car may be an important consideration because public transportation in the area is limited. In the first two years most students live on campus or nearby, often sharing houses.

Phase III requires 26 elective weeks, at least 14 of them clinical, in electives of one to four weeks, with no more than four in any one specialty. Research electives last at least four weeks; Scholarly Concentrations students take eight weeks, and others may take up to eight.

In Phase I you may take only electives that do not clash with required courses, apart from some longitudinal electives. Up to four weeks of them, taken at Stony Brook, count toward the elective weeks you need to graduate.

Away electives are capped at 20 weeks, with no more than three in one specialty. New York State liability coverage needs an affiliation agreement with the host; otherwise you may buy your own insurance. International electives need approval from the Director of Global Medical Education.

The Office of Global Medical Education lists formal agreements with programs in Thessaloniki, Buenos Aires, Cartagena, Guayaquil, Lima, Izmir, Tokyo, Atahualpa and Dublin, plus Sights on Health in Ecuador, Central America and South Dakota. Its electives include Medical Spanish, international research and clinical electives, and language immersion.

The August 2025 newsletter listed new electives including Business in Medicine, Lifestyle Medicine, Critical Care and Longitudinal Pediatric Continuity Practice. The emergency medicine ultrasound division offers a two-week point-of-care (bedside) ultrasound elective in year 4, where you scan with its faculty and fellows and are treated as a sub-intern. It also runs a yearly ultrasound course within Transition to Residency for students interested in emergency medicine, critical care or anesthesiology.

The Scholarly Concentrations Program is an optional four-year track in basic, translational and clinical research; global health; medical humanities and ethics; medical education; or medical innovation and technology. You apply by March 31 of year 1 with a full-time faculty mentor, and selected projects may be funded. The school reported 60 students enrolled across the tracks in 2025.

Projects take at least six months: two months in the summer after year 1, then at least eight weeks of project electives in Phase III. You also complete 10 hours of track training and summer and final reports, present at Research Day in late April or early May of year 4, and receive a certificate at graduation.

The MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) trains physician-scientists. You complete Phase I and Step 1, spend three to four years on a PhD, then return for at least 17 months of clinical training. Summer research rotations help you choose a thesis lab before graduate classes start in the fall of year 3. MD/PhD students can do thesis research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory or Brookhaven as well as on campus.

The MD/MPH adds the 54-credit Master of Public Health. The recommended route takes five years, with a one-year leave between two phases, and four public health courses count for 8 to 10 weeks of electives. The MD/MBA with the College of Business adds a 48-credit MBA, mostly completed before or after medical school, for a management career in health care.

The MD/MA adds 18 credits from the master's in Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics, together with the medical humanities scholarly track, within four years. The MD/MSECR adds a 33-credit master's in Epidemiology and Clinical Research, and the 2026-27 policies list an MD/MSBMI in Biomedical Informatics as pending approval.

In 3YMD you apply to the track, name the Stony Brook residency program you want and interview with it. You take four weeks of credit before Phase I and ten weeks in that program the summer after year 1, plus a two-week Teaching in Medicine course, then a shortened Phase III. If you meet the graduation standards, the program ranks you favorably in the residency match.

• 3YMD students must pass every Phase I course and clerkship, and every shelf exam and Step exam at the first attempt; otherwise they move to the four-year track and lose the residency pathway.
• 3YMD students give up the Phase I summer break and cannot take a research year or a joint degree.
• After Phase II you can request a leave of absence for research, but not after July 1 of Phase III.
• Scholars for Medicine is an eight-year bachelor's and MD route for high school students, who take part in medical school classes and activities as undergraduates.

The Clinical Simulation Center, on Level 2 of the Health Sciences Center (HSC), opened in 2006 with 20 exam rooms, three simulation labs and video recording of encounters for feedback. Its page lists adult, child and newborn manikins, task trainers for skills such as central lines, lumbar puncture and intubation, and about 100 standardized patients. Gynecological and male teaching associates teach intimate examinations, and the center runs BLS, ACLS and pediatric life support courses.

Advising runs through Pathways to Success. In Phase I you belong to an Advising POD, a small group that meets faculty and peer advisors for academic and early career advice, well-being and professional identity, with free lunch. Success coaches help with study strategies and time management, and fourth-year students tutor Phase I courses.

The Academic Success Program is an early warning system. Two failed exams in the fall of year 1 lead to a meeting with the Associate Dean for Student Affairs. Four failed exams in year 1 mean a required Summer Success Program before year 2. Participation is not reported on your transcript or MSPE.

The CAREERS program offers specialty advisors and guides, events and meetings with the deans who write MSPEs, and you must meet a specialty advisor before registering for Phase III. Each class has town halls with the dean's office four times a year.

Counseling and Psychological Services is free and confidential, with a satellite office on Level 3 of the HSC, and TimelyCare offers 24/7 telehealth. MeSH, a wellness group founded by students and faculty, runs social events, and Group Reflections is a confidential, student-led peer support group on Thursday evenings.

Professional identity formation runs from the White Coat Ceremony at the start of year 1 to the oath at graduation, including organized reflections during clerkships. It traces back to founding dean Edmund Pellegrino, and Medicine in Contemporary Society was introduced under Dean Jordan Cohen (1988 to 1994).