The UArizona College of Medicine – Phoenix MD program

The pre-clerkship curriculum is 11 blocks plus four longitudinal courses that run beside them, including Doctoring, the Community Clinical Experience and Personal and Professional Development (PPD). PPD comes in one-week stretches set inside or just after the organ-system blocks, with time for specialty shadowing, theme sessions, advising and wellness. Within each block, each basic science is covered or reviewed as needed: anatomy and imaging, biochemistry, cell biology and histology, genetics, microbiology, neuroscience, pathology, pharmacology and physiology.

Block directors match each topic to a format, so interactive lectures share the week with BioPac physiology labs, grand-rounds-style panels and patient panels, where patients describe their own experience of illness and care.

Longitudinal themes run through all four years, mainly in PPD sessions, and grow more clinical as you go. They cover behavioral science and physician well-being, bioethics and humanities, health systems science, evidence-based medicine and public health, and health equity. A strand of hot topics can change from year to year, with subjects such as artificial intelligence in health care and planetary health.

From March, when Year 3 begins, learning moves to clinical teams. Clerkships keep academic half-days of interactive sessions and simulation, and one-week PPD 3 and PPD 4 courses between rotations cover skills, career planning and wellness.

In the clerkship year, internal medicine and surgery expect you at your site about six days a week, with one day off, at the weekend when possible. Clerkships protect teaching time: Tuesday afternoons for internal medicine and family medicine, Thursday afternoons for psychiatry, and 7 am to 1 pm on the second, fourth and sixth Thursdays of surgery.

Several parts of the Year 1 and 2 week run on fixed slots alongside block teaching.

• Doctoring: a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, 1:00 to 5:15 pm, every one to two weeks, depending on which half of the class you are in.
• Community Clinical Experience: an afternoon at your preceptor's clinic, between 1:00 and 5:00 pm on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, about every other week from October of Year 1. It alternates with Doctoring.
• Clinical Anatomy, August to December of Year 1: lab sessions generally run 9:00 am to noon and 1:00 to 4:00 pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Anatomy is taught by cadaveric dissection. The 3-credit Clinical Anatomy block runs from August to December of Year 1, alongside Molecular Basis of Life and Disease and then the first musculoskeletal and nervous system block. It takes place in the gross anatomy laboratory of the Health Sciences Education Building, mostly in small lab groups, each assigned to a dissection table.

You learn from willed body donors, people who chose to give their bodies for teaching. The block asks you to treat them and your lab partners with empathy and respect. Clinical instructors from different specialties visit each table, helping you identify structures, advising on your dissection and linking what you find to clinical cases. A virtual 3D program, Anatomy.TV, supports the dissection.

The focus is clinical: which structures a procedure targets or must avoid, how anatomy underpins the physical exam, and which structures a patient's symptoms suggest are injured or diseased. The block also looks at how structural racism, unconscious bias and cultural humility bear on anatomy and patient care. Imaging returns in later blocks; in Nervous System II you match CT and MRI scans to gross specimens and microscope slides.

Doctoring builds your clinical skills over both pre-clerkship years. You work in cohorts of three students with the same physician preceptor for the year. A session typically includes a live demonstration, exam practice, a standardized patient encounter, a focused SOAP note (a structured clinical note: subjective, objective, assessment and plan) and an oral presentation exercise.

The standardized patients are university employees, trained both to portray a patient's problem and to give you verbal and written feedback. They present problems such as chest pain, abdominal pain, depression, a breast lump or a tremor. You also practice harder conversations, such as delivering bad news, an adolescent risk assessment and motivational interviewing for weight loss, plus gynecologic and genitourinary exams and a preschool well-child visit.

The Community Clinical Experience places you with an ambulatory care preceptor from October of Year 1 to October of Year 2. The college looks for primary care physicians, such as family doctors, general internists and pediatricians. You agree your afternoons with your preceptor and apply your Doctoring skills under supervision. At the end you present a patient you cared for to classmates and a physician facilitator.

Clinical Specialty Shadowing fills part of the PPD weeks in the first 18 months. You choose services in adult or pediatric settings to match your goals: a student drawn to the heart might pick an outpatient cardiology clinic, the cardiac catheterization lab and cardiothoracic surgery. Through the student-directed Community Health Initiative – Phoenix (CHIP), you can also work at a student-run clinic at the Wesley Community and Health Center.

In the pre-clerkship years every course is graded pass/fail. Block exams of USMLE-style multiple-choice questions come about every two to three weeks; you choose from flexible exam times and sit them on your laptop. Results stay anonymous from classmates and faculty, though learning specialists and two senior deans see grades so they can spot anyone who needs help.

Doctoring is graded by an OSCE with standardized patients at the end of each year. Faculty also rate your behavior against the program's six competency domains, from patient care and procedural skills to systems-based practice, set out in a policy updated June 23, 2026. Meeting expectations in every domain is required to graduate.

Clerkships are graded Honors, High Pass, Pass or Fail. The grade combines clinical evaluations by attending physicians (50%), clerkship assignments (20%) and the NBME shelf exam (30%), a national multiple-choice test in each clerkship subject from the National Board of Medical Examiners. Honors needs an Honors clinical score, an Honors composite and at least a High Pass on the shelf.

The shelf is offered on the afternoon of the clerkship's last Friday or the Sunday after. If you fail it you get one retake, but passing the retake caps your grade at Pass, and failing again means repeating the clerkship. Clerkship directors write the summary comments that go into your Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the dean's letter sent to residency programs.

Step 1 tests the sciences basic to medicine and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. Step 2 CK (Clinical Knowledge) still has a three-digit score, with a minimum pass of 218 since July 1, 2025. For MD students, attending a program accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) is what makes you eligible to sit the USMLE. Osteopathic (DO) students and international graduates qualify by other routes.

You must have taken Step 1 before clerkships begin. 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 replaced a 2028 start announced in June 2026, and the USMLE has urged schools to review rules on when students must test. On the current schedule, a July 2027 entrant would sit Step 1 in about January to mid-February 2029, as designated testing dates begin.

• In the last PPD 3 semester you are encouraged to plan your Step 2 CK study with a learning specialist.
• Obstetrics and gynecology adds its own OSCE, a fully immersive obstetric emergencies simulation and a one-to-one oral exam with the clerkship director or a designee.
• On surgery, Honors also requires two full 12-hour trauma call shifts and a 300- to 500-word reflection.
• From 2026-27, general electives not required for graduation are pass/fail, starting with the class due to graduate in 2028; required selectives keep four grades.

The college calls its approach a distributive model. Nine clinical affiliates provide sites across Maricopa County and rural parts of the state, giving you a range of patients and settings. Banner Health is the primary partner. Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix, an academic medical center, is one of the major clerkship partners, alongside Phoenix Children's, Barrow Neurological Institute, the Phoenix VA Health Care System, Valleywise Health and HonorHealth.

Pediatric clerkship directors are based at Phoenix Children's, and the neurology co-directors at Barrow and a Banner neurosciences clinic. Emergency medicine students join the Valleywise resident conference on Wednesday mornings. Internal medicine spans private, public, community and rural systems, so schedules are equivalent rather than identical. Some sites are a drive across the Phoenix area, known locally as the Valley, and transport and parking are your responsibility.

The college says a mid-1990s Arizona law requires medical students to complete a rural educational experience, and its Rural Health Professions Program exists to meet that aim. Rural rotations are open to all interested third- and fourth-year students. Housing is funded through the program by Arizona Area Health Education Centers (AzAHEC) and usually arranged by program staff, sometimes in shared quarters or a host's home. AzAHEC also pays one round trip and a small stipend.

The Rural Health Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship replaces some block rotations with specialties threaded through months at one rural site. You apply by the last Friday in August with a short application and an updated CV, and the selection committee asks Student Affairs for a letter of good standing. Terms last about 10 weeks, and sites run two to four terms worth 16 to 40 credits. Specialties a site does not cover are taken as block rotations, and some inpatient time may come in short bursts at Phoenix teaching hospitals.

PCAP has its own regional branches. A December 2025 announcement said the Yuma branch, run with Onvida Health, would admit up to 15 students a year for its first three years from July 2026. Their clinical training would span eight core specialties. An August 2026 announcement said the Gila River branch in Sacaton, run with Gila River Health Care, the Gila River Indian Community's tribally operated health system, would admit ten a year from July 2027.

Personalized Active Learning (PAL), a required one-credit block in the last five weeks of Year 1, asks for at least 45 hours of activities you pick. Options include research, clinical experience, global or rural health, service learning, Certificate of Distinction or dual degree work, leadership training, remediation, and enrichment electives such as Step 1 study or Medical Spanish.

If you apply by March 1 and are approved, an outside learning program of up to eight weeks can count toward PAL, using the five PAL weeks and the one-week summer break where possible. Students with a block or course failure cannot apply.

The college offers more than 200 electives at Phoenix-area hospitals, medical centers and private practices. Electives last two to four weeks, with at most two two-week courses. In Year 3 you take 12 elective weeks, including the ambulatory selective, and non-patient care electives such as research are limited to four weeks that year.

Year 4 holds 24 weeks of electives, usually six four-week rotations, which can include research, independent study and international rotations. Away rotations are electives run by faculty outside the college, often at hospitals where you may apply for residency, booked through the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) system. No more than 16 weeks may be in one specialty, and no more than 16 weeks at sites not supervised by the college's faculty; non-patient care electives are capped at eight weeks.

The MD/PhD trains physician-scientists through the Clinical Translational Sciences PhD program, run with the university's Graduate College, and takes seven to eight years. You complete the first two MD years and Step 1, then spend the PhD years on graduate courses, lab rotations, a comprehensive exam, research and a required minor, before returning for the clinical years. Students already at the college can apply in their second year.

The MD/MPH, offered with the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, focuses on clinical and public health leadership. Courses include epidemiology, biostatistics, public health policy and management, and clinical leadership and administration, plus a five-unit internship.

Pages written for the Classes of 2026, 2027 and 2028 describe the Scholarly Project, a four-year, hypothesis-driven research project every student completes. Students choose a mentor and submit a prospectus in Year 1 and present progress to a faculty panel in Year 2. In Year 4 they submit a thesis formatted for a PubMed-indexed journal and a poster for the Student Research Symposium.

The 2026-27 calendar lists Scholarly Project courses only for the Classes of 2027 and 2028, with none for the classes then in Years 1 and 2. The undated Research Education page says every student completes one, so ask which requirement will apply to your class. The optional Certificate of Distinction in Research offers four years of structured training around one rigorous project; you do not need it to do research.

The certificate is one of five optional Certificates of Distinction, extracurricular tracks with their own entry requirements. The others are Global Health, which includes a preceptorship abroad, Healthcare Leadership in Medicine, Health Humanities, and Service and Community Health. Three-year track students cannot enroll.

The Health Sciences Education Building, at 435 N. 5th Street, is where you spend most of your time in the early years. Its 268,000 square feet hold four 140-seat lecture halls, classrooms and learning suites, the gross anatomy laboratories and the 13,700-square-foot Arizona Health Sciences Library.

The Center for Simulation and Innovation opened in July 2012 and fills 33,000 square feet across three wings of the building. It has six procedure skills labs and 14 simulation labs: 11 hospital rooms, an emergency room and two obstetrics or surgery suites. Each simulation lab has an adult or pediatric high-fidelity mannequin, a control room behind one-way glass and a debriefing room where recorded scenarios are reviewed.

Task trainers let you rehearse blood draws, IV and central lines, lumbar puncture, joint injection, chest tubes and airway management, and screen-based simulators include virtual ultrasound and eye examination trainers. Doctoring takes place in the Center for Clinical Skills and Assessment on the third floor, which has 24 exam rooms with two recording cameras each, five debriefing rooms and a 24-station observation room.

Both centers are shared with Northern Arizona University (NAU), whose physician assistant, physical therapy and occupational therapy programs use them too. The simulation center also serves NAU's athletic training program.

You are assigned a House Advisor, a longitudinal career advisor you meet at least once a year and can contact at any time. The advising program is built on the Careers in Medicine resources of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Clinical Specialty Advisors add specialty-specific guidance from early interest through the Match.

Learning Specialists help with study strategies, test-taking, self-management and board preparation. Coaching, Advising and Mentorship (CAMP) requirements build this in. In PPD 1 and 2 you must meet your House Advisor and a Learning Specialist at least once and attend a supplemental instruction session. PPD 3 sets advising meetings in its first two semesters.

PPD weeks reserve time for wellness, and Student and Resident Wellness offers mental health resources and programming. The Learning Environment Office handles professionalism and learning environment concerns, including through a confidential online feedback form, and university tutoring is available.