The Tufts University School of Medicine MD program

The curriculum is integrated at three levels. Basic and clinical sciences share each organ-system course, courses running at the same time reinforce each other, and every pre-clerkship course is built to prepare you for clerkships. In the respiratory course, for example, you learn the lung exam in the patient-care track, Foundations of Patient Care, and reason through a case of shortness of breath in Foundations of Clinical Reasoning.

Each organ-system course moves from normal structure and function to disease, prevention, diagnosis and treatment, with considerable time on case-based sessions about common symptoms and abnormal test results. Perspectives in Medicine threads, on health systems, population health, the patient experience and personal development, run through all of them. A faculty page says active learning, such as small groups and team-based learning, makes up at least half of every course.

The 2025-26 student handbook sets limits on the pre-clerkship week. Scheduled contact time should average no more than 25 hours a week over a month, counting class sessions, required pre-work, coaching and CAP. Over any two weeks you should also average at least two full mornings or afternoons a week free for self-study.

Preparing for an active-learning session should take no more than 40 minutes per hour of class, and that time counts toward the 25 hours.

• Wednesdays, late August into November of year 1: Interviewing, with demonstration interviews in the morning and small-group patient interviews in the afternoon.
• Once a week in the fall of year 1: a two-hour problem-based learning session with your group.
• Evenings in year 1: Physical Diagnosis practice in the Sim Center, 5 to 8:30 pm on a faculty page.
• Tuesday afternoons in year 1: optional Selectives for clinical shadowing, while MD/MPH students take their Master of Public Health classes.

Anatomy is taught by cadaveric dissection within the organ-system courses. The musculoskeletal course introduces it with the lower limb, back and upper limb. You dissect the thorax and neck during the respiratory course and the kidneys, ureters and bladder during the renal course, linking each structure to how it works.

A faculty page describes lectures, lab dissections and small groups covering the limbs, thorax, abdomen, pelvis, and head and neck, and invites clinicians to help at the tables. The organ-system courses also use virtual anatomy. Neuroanatomy works differently: labs in the year 2 neuroscience course use computer programs written by the course directors and prosections, specimens already dissected for you.

The Michael Jaharis Jr. Anatomy Laboratory, opened in 2017 on the third floor of the M&V Building, has room for more than 200 students and faculty. Each of its 44 dissection tables has high-resolution imaging and a computer screen, and the lab has iPads and cameras. Anatomy practical exams are held there. Donated bodies come through the Tufts Anatomical Gift Program, run by the Department of Medical Education.

Your first patients come in the second month, through Medical Interviewing and the Doctor-Patient Relationship. A section leader supervises your small group as you interview patients. You spend six sessions in a hospital such as Tufts Medical Center, Lahey, Newton-Wellesley or South Shore, two at an elderly housing site and two in the Sim Center.

You also practice interviewing through an interpreter and with simulated patients. The course ends with an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), a set of timed encounters with standardized patients, which you must pass before moving on.

Physical Diagnosis follows, timed to match the organ systems: November to May on the Curriculum page, December to June on a faculty page. In evening sessions you watch a demonstration, then practice under supervision on manikins and standardized patients, often with ultrasound, region by region from the limbs to the nervous system.

CAP then takes you into primary care. The Curriculum page says it starts in the last unit of year 1 and runs 18 weeks, to early January of year 2. The CAP page and the 2025-26 schematic place it in year 2, and the CAP page gives 15 Mondays from August. Its workshops cover office procedures, notes and presentations, lifestyle counseling, breast and pelvic exams and caring for children and adolescents.

All pre-clerkship courses are graded pass/fail. You pass with a final course grade of 70% or more, and some courses also set minimum scores on particular exams. Grades come from multiple-choice and short-answer exams, lab exams, quizzes, written work and faculty observation. A failed course goes to the Student Ethics and Promotions Committee, which can approve a remediation exam at the end of the year.

Clinical skills are tested in OSCEs in the Sim Center in Boston or in Maine. You cannot appeal an OSCE score, but a failed OSCE gets an automatic faculty review. Faculty who teach you for more than 1.5 hours in a course must give you narrative feedback.

Clerkships are graded Honors, High Pass, Pass, Low Pass or Fail. Each core clerkship ends with an OSCE or oral exam plus an NBME shelf exam, a standardized national subject test from the National Board of Medical Examiners. LIC students take the same exams and online cases as block students. Any Low Pass or Fail goes to the promotions committee and may be grounds for dismissal.

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits MD programs in the United States. Its directory, updated July 22, 2026, lists Tufts with full accreditation and a next survey in 2029-30. For an MD program, LCME accreditation is what makes its students eligible for the USMLE. Step 1 has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022; Step 2 CK still gets a three-digit score.

School policy has you take Step 1 after the dedicated study period and before clerkship orientation. You must pass it before the advanced phase, within three attempts and two years of finishing year 2. Step 2 CK must be taken to graduate, and the calendars put its deadline just before the advanced phase begins (May 3, 2026, for one recent class). The 2025-26 handbook says May 1 of your fourth year, a year it counts from the start of that phase, so both point to about the same date.

In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. That announcement moved the start from 2028, the year set in June 2026. On the current schedule, a 2027 entrant would sit Step 1 by late March 2029, after the switch, and Step 2 CK in the Capstone block around April or early May 2030. The USMLE has urged schools to review rules on when students must test, so the school's rules may change before your exams.

• The End-of-Core-Clerkship OSCE, held March to June, has seven or eight video-recorded encounters with standardized patients, from headache to anxiety. Faculty rate your history, exam and communication and read your write-up. You must pass it to graduate.
• Surgery is also assessed through an oral exam in its last week, a brief oral presentation and ratings from faculty and residents.
• Maine LIC students sit their six shelf exams spread across the year; on the 2026-27 dates they run from psychiatry in June to medicine in January.
• Graduation also requires your scholarly project and the community service hours. The MD must be finished within seven years, or ten for MD/PhD students, including any leave.

Tufts Medical Center, the principal teaching hospital, is next to the school in downtown Boston: a 415-bed academic medical center on the Clinical Partners page, 400 beds on the program overview. The school's four other major academic partners are Lahey Hospital & Medical Center, Maine Medical Center, Newton-Wellesley Hospital and South Shore Hospital. Several Tufts pages, mostly department pages, still name St. Elizabeth's Medical Center; the current Clinical Partners page lists the sites below instead.

You choose your third-year schedule through the Registrar's web-based system between January and April of year 2; after that you can only swap a clerkship one-for-one with a classmate. Fourth-year rotations can be dropped up to 30 days before a block, though some have a no-drop rule and Maine clerkships a two-month add/drop rule.

The Family Medicine department says over 80% of its clerkship sites are within a 45-minute drive of Boston, though some are as far as Cape Cod, Vermont and Maine. Many partner sites require a current criminal background check, which the Registrar runs before years 2, 3 and 4, and a respirator mask fit test.

For core clerkships, Maine Track students choose block rotations at Maine Medical Center in Portland or the LIC, which is also open to Boston students when places allow. LIC students live in one Maine community for nine months, two to four per site, with weekly half-day clinics in six specialties and emergency department shifts. They follow their own patients into hospital, surgery and childbirth, and add one or two four-week immersion blocks of inpatient and elective rotations.

Choice starts small. Selectives, optional in year 1, let you pick a clinical setting and shadow a preceptor for four afternoons of at least three hours each. Surgeons, for example, take students into the operating room. In the core clerkship year, the calendar includes two-week elective blocks.

The Fourth Year Catalog, given to third-year students in late January, describes the electives at affiliated hospitals. The Psychiatry department lists 14 electives, open in year 3 once you finish its clerkship, and the Surgery department says acting-intern electives are offered at all its partner sites. Any rotation beyond the school's required minimum can be taken at another hospital or medical school, with credit if the Dean of Student Affairs approves your schedule.

You can take up to three away rotations, four-week electives at other LCME-accredited US medical schools. Most host schools use Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO), the application service of the Association of American Medical Colleges. The Registrar must approve each rotation in advance, and credit needs a grade of Satisfactory or higher. Host hospitals sometimes bump visiting students, and Tufts cannot guarantee a replacement.

Global health electives come at two points. In the summer after year 1 you can spend at least six weeks abroad observing, doing community outreach or research. The school sponsors summer programs in Vellore, India, and in Accra, Ghana, where the program runs seven to eight weeks.

In the spring of year 4, January to April, clinical electives abroad earn credit after at least four weeks. They include an exchange in Panama City for up to six students, where good Spanish is essential.

Every student completes a scholarly project over the four years: you frame a question, use suitable methods and present your findings, with presentations in April of year 4. It can be basic science or clinical research, or focus on public health, civic engagement or quality improvement. Summer research fellowships after year 1 fund at least eight full-time weeks and end with a poster at a fall Poster Fair.

For deeper research, the Research Concentration Program gives you six months to a year of full-time research after the core clerkship year. You must have passed Step 1 and should already have taken Step 2 CK. You work at least 35 hours a week with a research preceptor and take no courses. The school also awards the MD with Research Honors for a substantial, original research contribution.

The MD/MPH adds a Master of Public Health within the same four years. MPH classes take Tuesday afternoons in years 1 and 2, and a 200-hour field experience fills the summer after year 1. Public health courses then take late winter and early spring of years 3 and 4. You usually give up two clinical electives, finish with an Integrative Learning Experience, and some students add a year.

The MD/PhD is a Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) with the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, supported partly by a National Institutes of Health grant. The program's FAQ page gives an average of 7 to 8 years, and Maine Track students cannot apply.

You start in mid-June with a research rotation. The Graduate School's curriculum page puts Step 1 in April of year 2, followed by one required clinical rotation. You then do a PhD in one of seven programs, with a family medicine rotation along the way, and return for the remaining clerkships.

With the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy you can add an MA in international relations; Fletcher describes this Mid-Career MAIA/MD as a five-year program. The four-year MD/MBA with Brandeis University's Heller School has been discontinued. The Sam W. Ho Health Justice Scholars Program, for a selected group of students committed to underserved communities, adds mentoring by community health center physicians and a longitudinal project in an underserved setting. The Active Citizenship Concentration Program lets students with clinical experience pause the curriculum for full-time volunteer work in the US or abroad.

Study spaces are spread across the Medical Education Building at 145 Harrison Avenue and the M&V Building at number 136. The four Learning Communities share two floors of the Medical Education Building, with a living room, kitchen, small-group classrooms and study spaces. Above them, the Hirsh Health Sciences Library fills floors 4 to 7, with quiet floors, study rooms and seven bookable collaboration rooms.

The Thompson Clinical Skills and Simulation Center opened in 2023 at 136 Harrison Avenue. Its 15,000 square feet hold 16 exam rooms wired for audio and video, so faculty can watch from monitoring rooms. Four simulation rooms use robotic manikins that can play an adult, a pregnant woman or an infant. A skills space with task trainers for suturing, central lines and intubation is open to students out of hours.

In Maine, MaineHealth's Katahdin Learning Center provides classrooms and study space. Maine Track students have services comparable to Boston's, including a simulation center, library support, student affairs and academic advising.

Your coach is the main faculty member responsible for your professional identity development, meeting you individually and in small groups, helping teach clinical skills and guiding reflection. Maine Track students are assigned a Maine faculty physician as their coach.

At orientation you are also assigned a Peer Preceptor, a second-year student who helps you settle in. For what it calls a high-volume learning environment, the Office of Student Affairs offers one-to-one academic counseling, including for Step 1 and Step 2, and trained peer tutors for pre-clerkship students. It also arranges accommodations for documented disabilities.

Wellness is built into year 1 through Practical Approaches to Wellness, talks and workshops, many of them required, on sleep, stress, money, relationships and impostor syndrome. COMPASS offers optional mindfulness groups in the fall, co-led by trained second-year students, and Healer's Art is an optional 15-hour elective on humanism in medicine. Free, confidential counseling is available in person in Boston and by phone on rotations.

Career advising runs through the Specialty Advising, Guidance and Exploration (SAGE) program and, in years 3 and 4, Pathway to Residency. It includes a Career Specialty Night in January of year 3, help planning your fourth year, CV and personal statement reviews, mock interviews, your dean's letter (the MSPE) and rank-list meetings.