The Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB MD program

Well Beyond is designed so that clinical problems frame the science from the start. Phase 1 opens with Medicine and Society and the 12-week Foundations of Medicine course. Then come the organ-system courses: musculoskeletal and skin, heart and lungs, kidneys and gut, endocrine and reproductive, and the nervous system and behavior. Anatomy, histology, pathology, pharmacology, microbiology and genetics run through these courses as threads, alongside ethics, anti-racism, biomedical informatics, disease prevention and the social determinants of health.

The five longitudinal courses are Foundations of Patient-Centered Care, Learning Communities, Humanism (the Art of Medicine), Scientific Literacy and Inquiry, and Health Systems Science. Health systems science covers how care is paid for, run and made safer. The school builds the curriculum on five pillars: foundational sciences, clinical sciences, health systems science, humanities and humanism (including anti-racism and cultural humility), and scientific literacy and inquiry.

The school describes its methods as less time in lecture halls and more on problem-solving, with case-based inquiry learning as the main small-group format. From Phase 2 the teaching moves to wards and clinics, and Phase 3 adds more independence in advanced rotations.

In Phase 1 you take one block course at a time, while the longitudinal courses continue all semester. Your case-based inquiry group meets twice a week, and every other week one afternoon goes to CommunityConnect.

The school caps required Phase 1 activities at 35 hours a week, counting both scheduled sessions and required preparation: a 30-minute video assigned before a one-hour class counts as 1.5 hours. A day should hold no more than eight hours of scheduled class, to protect time for independent study.

Exams come every few weeks: in fall 2026, Foundations of Medicine had four exams plus one from the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) over 12 weeks. Clinical immersion weeks follow the site's schedule instead and can run past the usual cap.

In clerkships you follow the work-hour limits set for residents by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). That means at most 80 hours a week averaged over four weeks, no shift over 24 hours and at least 24 hours off in a row each week. Internal medicine includes night and weekend duties, surgery has night call, and pediatrics one weekend shift.

Clinical skills teaching starts in your first weeks, when Foundations of Patient-Centered Care begins in July. Your first required clinical experience is a two-week clinical immersion in late October of year 1; the second comes in late March and early April, and the third in September of year 2.

The school lists more than 50 clinical immersion sites around Western New York, in three kinds of setting: inpatient, outpatient and procedural. It welcomes rural sites so that students learn about care for medically underserved patients; those it currently names are The Chautauqua Center, Westfield Family Physicians, The Resource Center and Family Health Medical Services.

The point of an immersion is not to learn one specialty but to apply what you are learning in class. Each one pulls together the science, your clinical skills, the patient's experience, the social determinants of health and how the health system works, as preparation for the clerkships. Hospital credentialing and onboarding are done in training sessions during the immersions.

CommunityConnect, a required service-learning program that starts in year 1, pairs community service with set learning objectives, preparation and reflection. Your team of three works with a Buffalo community-based organization one day every other week, three hours at a time, for three semesters. In the fall of year 2 your team helps the incoming first-year team settle in.

In the summer after year 1, about seven weeks from June are free for an optional project in a patient care setting or community health organization, research or your required scholarly project.

• Community partners named by the school include Compeer Buffalo, which offers friendship-based support to people working toward mental well-being, and Big Big Table Community Café, which serves affordable meals. Others are the Buffalo Prenatal Perinatal Network and GObike.
• Outside the curriculum, UB HEALS is a student-run street medicine program working to improve access to health care for people experiencing homelessness in Buffalo.

Phase 1 courses are graded pass/fail, with a pass at an overall 69.50% or more. In the fall 2026 calendar, Foundations of Medicine and each organ-system course ended with an NBME exam; the NBME co-sponsors the USMLE with the Federation of State Medical Boards. All exams are sat in person, and local exam scores come back within five business days.

Your Phase 1 percentages still count toward a Dean's Letter of Commendation, given to students who earn at least 90% of the available points in a phase, and class standing averages all three phases. Latin honors also need a first-time Step 1 pass and a Step 2 CK score at the 60th, 80th or 90th national percentile.

Courses of four weeks or more give formal midpoint feedback, and small-group facilitators write narrative assessments. The school calls its approach programmatic assessment: you and your learning community coach use your results, including progress tests, to set learning goals.

Clerkships are graded Honors, High Satisfactory, Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory, from clinical performance and a written exam. Each clerkship's NBME subject exam, or shelf exam, must reach the 5th percentile for your academic quarter; passing on the one retake caps your grade at Satisfactory. You must also log an observed history and physical exam and your required clinical experiences.

You must pass Step 1 to be promoted to Phase 2, and Step 2 CK to graduate. Step 1 has been reported only as pass or fail since January 2022. LCME accreditation is what makes students of an MD program like this one eligible to sit the USMLE.

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, a July 2027 entrant would study for Step 1 from late December 2028 and sit it by about mid to late February 2029, shortly after the switch. Step 2 CK would most likely fall between May and mid-August 2030, early in Phase 3.

• These dates are projections: the 2028-29 and 2029-30 calendars are not yet published, and the Office of Medical Education sets the Step deadlines each year. In October 2026 the school told the Class of 2028 that Step 2 CK could not be taken before April 2027 and that most would sit it between May and mid-August.
• OSCEs are observed, structured clinical exams with standardized patients (role players). The clerkship OSCE described in September 2026 has two cases, scored on your interaction with the patient (25%), a history, examination and counseling checklist (30%) and your written note (45%).
• If you fail your first Step 1 attempt you are not promoted, and you use a clerkship block to prepare and retake it. Failing Step 1 or Step 2 three times leads to dismissal.
• If you are short of the school's Step 1 benchmarks, you can request four more weeks of dedicated study with weekly learning specialist meetings; the school says this need not delay graduation. A delay to 10 weeks past the deadline moves your Phase 2 schedule, and a longer one means a leave of absence and joining the next class.
• A failed Phase 1 course can be made up through a structured six-week remediation ending in an equivalent exam; three failed Phase 1 courses, or a failed remediation, lead to a recommendation for dismissal.

Your clinical training takes place at hospitals and practices in and around Buffalo. The school's building is on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus downtown, a 120-acre hub of hospitals and research institutes that includes Buffalo General Medical Center. The Training Sites page lists eight hospitals: three from Kaleida Health, two from Catholic Health, Erie County Medical Center, the Buffalo VA Medical Center and Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The registrar assigns you to required clerkships, and each clerkship's coordinator manages your site. Where your preference is taken into account, the coordinator contacts you before the module. You can ask for a different site 12 weeks before a clerkship begins, but you may not swap sites with another student.

Sites vary by specialty. Internal medicine runs at five hospitals and many outpatient sites; on the wards, two or three students join a team with an attending physician, the senior doctor in charge, and two or three residents. Surgery is taught across seven hospitals, and the neurology department teaches at Golisano Children's Hospital, Buffalo General, Erie County Medical Center (ECMC), the VA and Millard Fillmore Suburban.

Electives in years 1 and 2 are optional, usually spring-only and limited to one per semester, and none is allowed in your first fall; a lottery settles oversubscribed ones. Current options include Introduction to Anesthesiology, Introduction to Emergency Medicine, Introduction to Orthopaedic Surgery, Honors Pharmacology and Asylum Medicine, on advocacy and medical-legal support for people seeking asylum.

Phase 2 includes one four-week elective, in the pediatrics block. For Phase 2 and 3 electives, the school surveys your top three choices within your assigned module, then places you by a randomized process that weighs those choices, specialty availability and prerequisites.

Phase 3 includes five required four-week electives. You may take up to two research modules and no more than three electives in one departmental division at UB. Options include sub-internships in trauma, vascular, transplant and pediatric surgery, pediatric intensive care, neonatology and family medicine, plus electives from sleep medicine to addiction medicine, medical Spanish and global health. The school's coursebook, in entries dated July 2026, also lists senior anatomy electives: Advanced Clinical Musculoskeletal Anatomy, Advanced Human Dissection and Senior Teaching in the Anatomical Sciences.

Away electives, taken at other institutions, are open to Phase 3 students in good standing. The host must have an affiliation agreement with UB, and you apply through the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) service of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The school's June 2025 Clerkship and Elective Assignment Policy allows up to four, the fourth only with a dean's approval. No more than two may be at one institution, and an international elective counts toward the total.

Students apply in year 3 for the Generalist Scholars Program, a year-long fourth-year track for those heading into primary care residencies in Buffalo. A June 2026 school article says up to 10 are chosen each year. Scholars start with a month-long clinical preceptorship, then keep a weekly continuity clinic, with clinical and research mentors; the program does not guarantee a Buffalo residency.

Every student completes a health sciences scholarly project (HSSP), an in-depth project in an area of medicine or health care, guided by a mentor, from January of year 1 to April of year 4. It can be bench or clinical research, public health, quality improvement, patient safety, the business of medicine, biomedical informatics, education or another field.

You are matched with a mentor in the spring of year 1 and have semester progress reviews in Phase 2. Late in Phase 2 you prepare a short pitch about your project for residency interviews, and you present it at the Medical Student Research Forum at the end of Phase 3. MD-PhD and MPH students use their degree's research instead but still present.

Departments also run summer research programs. Among them are eight-week programs in emergency medicine, where students enroll patients at ECMC, and in family medicine, a seven-week pediatrics program and paid fellowships in eye and vision research. The school also helps students find year-long research fellowships taken on academic leave, such as the NIH Medical Research Scholars Program.

The MD-PhD program is fully funded, and the school's pages put its average length at seven to eight years. You follow the MD curriculum for the first 18 months, with a research seminar and lab rotations in the summer after year 1. After Phase 1 you enter a PhD program, from options spanning four UB schools, with a clinical mentor to keep your clinical skills fresh, then return for Phases 2 and 3.

The MD/MBA, with the UB School of Management, takes five years: Phases 1 and 2, a year of the MBA, then Phase 3 and the rest of the MBA. The MD/MPH adds a year of public health study after Phase 2; you apply in year 2 with a dean's approval, and the school's pages put the total at five to six years.

Second-year students can apply for the Jacobs School Leadership Track, sponsored by the Alpha Omega Alpha honor medical society, which offers leadership training, one-on-one faculty mentoring and a leadership project. A September 2026 notice to students said its website was being revised for the new curriculum and changes to the track.

• A three-year primary care MD, the Primary Care Accelerated Track (PCAT), was proposed in October 2025 pending New York State Education Department approval, with a summer 2026 target start. In October 2026 the dean said the Buffalo Primary Care Initiative will offer it.

The school's building at 955 Main Street holds its teaching rooms and research labs. Instead of rows of seats, its learning rooms let the class face each other in a circle or split into small groups.

The Margaret L. Wendt Foundation Clinical Competency Center has 18 exam rooms set up like an outpatient clinic. Cameras in each room, even inside the otoscopes, let faculty watch sessions live and record them to review with you afterwards.

At the Behling Human Simulation Center, students from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy and other health professions train together. It is named for Ralph Behling, MD '43, the first physician in Buffalo to use injected penicillin.

The Gross Anatomy Lab has 32 dissection tables, on-site specimen storage and large screens on a live feed, so something one team finds can be shown at once to all 180 students. The Brain Museum, or Museum of Neuroanatomy, displays more than 80 illuminated brain specimens.

Your learning community is the core of the support system. You keep the same coach and group through all four years, as more students join in later years. Groups sit in five neighborhoods of six coaches each, and Learning Communities continues as a course in every phase.

Coaches guide the group through patient scenarios, give feedback, and offer academic guidance and career advice; they meet monthly to discuss cases and student concerns.

The Learning Sciences and Educational Success Program offers workshops and one-on-one academic counseling on study strategies, time management and test-taking. If you remediate a Phase 1 course, you draw up a study plan with a learning specialist and can call on your coach and peer educators.

Career advising runs through all four years. In year 1 you can meet a dean one-on-one about your resume and summer plans, and specialty interest groups run by Polity, the student government, offer shadowing with local physicians. Later years bring small-group sessions on residency applications and mock interview nights.