The UC Irvine School of Medicine MD program

The school says its curriculum has moved over the last ten years from a traditional, subject-by-subject structure to the systems-organized iTEACH approach. In Years 1 and 2, course directors coordinate their schedules within these blocks, so related subjects such as anatomy, histology and physiology are scheduled together. A session can be a lecture, live or pre-recorded, a lab, a small-group discussion, self-directed study or a clinical correlate, where a clinician links the science to real cases.

Years 1 and 2 each have a clinical thread: the Clinical Foundations course and the PACE clinic. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons you work in groups of three to five in the Clinical Skills and Simulation Centers with Dean's Scholars, faculty physicians experienced in teaching clinical skills.

You need an iPad by the first week, and Year 1 and 2 exams are generally taken on your own device. Each course director marks in the syllabus which sessions are mandatory. In Years 1 and 2 you get two personal and two academic one-day absence vouchers a year, requested at least 30 days ahead.

From Year 3 you learn mainly on clinical teams. Clinical Foundations III prepares you for clerkships and returns as an intersession linking topics across specialties. Clinical Foundations IV prepares you for residency, the specialty training that follows medical school. The four Clinical Foundations courses form one thread.

Gross Anatomy and Embryology is a Year 1 course. It runs through the Normal Human Structure and Function block from August to December and returns in Mind and Brain, which adds neuroanatomy and the head and neck. It stresses normal structure and function, abnormal findings you may meet in clinic, and how the body develops.

The school says anatomy is taught through a regional approach, one region of the body at a time, with an emphasis on laboratory dissections and demonstrations. Lectures, X-ray images, discussions and clinical correlates support the laboratory work, and the course objectives ask you to teach clinical anatomy to classmates and link it to examination, imaging and procedures.

The 2026-27 Year 1 schedule has four anatomy practical exams, in September, October and December 2026 and March 2027, alongside written exams combining anatomy with other subjects. Donors come through the UC Irvine Willed Body Program, and the school honors them at a Ceremony of Thanks attended by families, faculty and students.

Your first clinical session comes in your first week. The Clinical Skill Boot Camp is a multi-station course with standardized patients, simulation and procedure training, ending in a debrief with clinicians and basic science course directors.

Year 1 clinical skills start with history taking, then systems modules: cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, pulmonary, HEENT (head, eyes, ears, nose and throat), neurology and musculoskeletal. Midway through the year you begin the Top Ten Family Medicine Chief Concerns with flank pain, dizziness and headaches. Year 2 adds back pain, fever, fatigue and edema, chest pain, shortness of breath and abdominal pain.

Clinical Foundations I and II teach interviewing, examination, clinical reasoning and health promotion, with feedback on your interviews, examinations and written patient reports. You present an evidence-based review of a topic you choose in Year 1 and, in Year 2, a case from your PACE clinic.

Real patients come through PACE, the weekly clinic with your preceptor, from the second half of Year 1 on the current curriculum map through Year 2. You may also volunteer at free clinics outside the curriculum if it does not clash with your schedule.

Courses and clerkships are graded Honors where a course offers it, Pass, Fail or Incomplete under the May 2026 grading policy, and the exam policy marks honors as not applicable in MS1 courses. Class rank comes only from MS2 courses, worth 30%, and MS3 clerkships, worth 70%, with Honors earning more points than Pass.

Rank sorts you into groups for the Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the dean's letter residency programs read. Outstanding covers roughly the top 10% and Excellent the next 20%, followed by Very Good, and Good for anyone who failed and remediated a course.

Years 1 and 2 bring exams every few weeks. The 2026-27 MS1 schedule lists 22, including NBME subject exams, national standardized tests, in histology, physiology, neuroscience, immunology and biochemistry. Where a course sets a minimum NBME score, you get one retake.

Each core clerkship ends with an NBME subject exam, or shelf exam, in that specialty. It counts for 10% to 50% of the grade, as each clerkship director decides, and you must reach the 6th percentile to pass. Grades can also use faculty and resident evaluations, simulation and Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), timed stations with standardized patients.

MS3 has OSCEs in internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, neurology, surgery and pediatrics. After the core clerkships comes the CPX, designed by clinicians and educators from 10 California medical schools to test history taking, examination and communication with standardized patients. You have three attempts to pass it.

The USMLE is the licensing exam series for MD students. Step 1 covers the sciences behind medicine and has been pass/fail since January 26, 2022; Step 2 Clinical Knowledge (CK) covers clinical medicine. For MD students, attending an LCME-accredited program is what makes you eligible, and DO students and international graduates qualify through other routes.

• Step 1: you sit it after passing all MS2 courses and never during CF III and Radiology. To start clerkships on time you must take it by a set Tuesday in mid-May (May 12 in 2026), and spring results often arrive only in mid-June.
• If you score below 60 on the March CBSE, you must reach 65 on an NBME self-assessment at least five business days before Step 1.
• If you fail Step 1, you may finish your current rotation, then go on personal leave to study and build a new clinical schedule once you pass. Not passing within a year of finishing MS2 makes you eligible for probation, and not passing within 24 months and three attempts makes you eligible for dismissal.
• Step 2 CK, in MS4: schedule it by July 1, make a first attempt by October 1 and pass by February 1. The Match is the national system that places graduates in residency programs. The school will not certify you for it without a Step 1 pass and a Step 2 CK attempt by about February 15.
• On the current schedule, a student entering in 2027 (the Class of 2031) would finish MS2 teaching in mid-March 2029 and sit Step 1 between late March and about mid-May 2029. Step 2 CK would be due by October 1, 2030, with a pass by February 1, 2031.
• In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. A June 2026 notice had named 2028. Both of your Step exams would fall after the change.
• USMLE says it will publish testing dates more than a year ahead, and it has urged schools to revisit rules on when students must test, so UC Irvine's deadlines may change.
• The LCME directory, updated October 14, 2026, lists the program as fully accredited, with its next survey in 2032-33. The school says it was reaccredited for a full eight years in 2025.

Years 1 and 2 are based mostly in the Medical Education Building on the Irvine campus. Clinical training then centers on UCI Medical Center in the city of Orange, which UCI Health now calls UCI Health — Orange. The school keeps an office there for third- and fourth-year students, and the handbook's wellness page calls this a split medical campus.

UCI Medical Center is the primary teaching hospital, with a regional burn center and the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, designated by the National Cancer Institute. As a Level I adult trauma center, it is equipped to treat life-threatening injuries around the clock. Internal medicine and psychiatry also use the Veterans Affairs (VA) Long Beach Healthcare System and its Tibor Rubin VA Medical Center.

For pediatrics, Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), now part of Rady Children's Health according to both its own site and the 2026-27 catalogue, says UC Irvine students do their clerkship rotation there. CHOC adds that UCI Medical Center keeps newborn nursery, neonatal intensive care and pediatric emergency services. Family medicine places you with a family physician at a UCI-affiliated clinic. Every required clerkship and selective must be taken through UC Irvine, not as an away rotation at another school.

Electives spread wider. Many run at UCI Medical Center, VA Long Beach or on campus, and others at affiliated hospitals and clinics mainly in Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, including several rural locations. The UCI Health Family Health Centers in Santa Ana and Anaheim, which mostly serve Spanish-speaking patients on Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program, train residents and medical students.

In MS1 and MS2 you can take electives noted on your transcript. Options include Medical Spanish, Medical Vietnamese, Culinary Medicine, Caring for the Underserved, Surgical Skills, Ultrasound and Playing Doctor, which uses improvisational theater to sharpen communication. Research electives of up to three weeks fit in the summer after MS1.

For students entering MS3 after May 23, 2026, the clinical years need at least 28 weeks of electives, 22 of them clinical, at 30 or more contact hours a week. Up to 6 of those weeks can come before MS4, including at least 2 in MS3, and research electives can supply up to six.

No more than 16 elective weeks after MS3, research included, can be in one specialty. Longitudinal electives, which run across a whole year, are only for MS4 students or mission-based programs, and some mission-based coursework earns elective credit.

In MS4 you can take away rotations, electives at other LCME-accredited schools. You must apply for UC Irvine's approval at least 30 days before the rotation starts and wait for it before you begin. Changing or dropping an elective needs notice ranging from 11 business days at UCI Health sites to 90 at VA Long Beach.

• Emergency Medicine Ultrasound: enough emergency department shifts to perform at least 75 scans a week.
• Geriatrics: clinics, house calls, skilled nursing facilities and a visit to the Forensic Center, which evaluates elder abuse.
• Integrative Medicine at the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute in Costa Mesa and the Family Health Center in Santa Ana.
• UCI Outreach Clinics: direct care for uninsured patients.

The school's dual-degree page names the MD/MBA, MD/MPH and MD/PhD, and the student handbook adds the MD/MS-BATS. Academic leave for a dual degree does not count toward the six-year limit for finishing the MD. If you study for the degree on leave after MS3, as MBA and MPH students do, you must be in good academic standing. You must also take the CPX and make your first Step 2 CK attempt before the master's coursework starts.

The Medical Student Research Program (MSRP), run by UC Irvine's Institute for Clinical and Translational Science, pairs you with a faculty mentor for a project that leads to an abstract, poster or publication. The Dean's Office Summer Research Fellowship pays stipends for research at UC Irvine. Two programs funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), on diabetes, digestive and kidney diseases and on aging, support 8 to 12 weeks of full-time research in the summer after MS1. A research leave of absence is also possible.

• MD/PhD: the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) pairs the MD with a PhD from any UC Irvine graduate program you qualify for, in a normative eight years and at most 10. You apply through extra questions on the secondary application, and a fellowship covers a stipend, tuition and fees.
• MD/MBA: five years, with the Paul Merage School of Business. You apply in MS2, and MBA coursework starts after MS3.
• MD/MPH: five years. The program page says you apply in your second or third year and the catalogue says the third; both say MPH coursework starts after MS3.
• MD/MS-BATS: the Master of Science in Biomedical and Translational Science, a one-year clinical research degree that ends in a thesis or capstone project.
• PRIME-LC (Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community), founded in 2004: a five-year MD plus a master's such as an MPH or MBA. It admits about 12 Spanish-speaking students a year, who apply on the secondary application and have an extra interview in Spanish.
• PRIME-LC students take Chicano-Latino Studies seminars in MS1 to MS3, do a four-week clinical rotation in Latin America after MS3 and complete the master's year before MS4.
• PRIME LEAD-ABC (Program in Medical Education Leadership Education to Advance Doctoring – African, Black and Caribbean): four years, with an optional fifth year at UC Irvine for a master's. It selects 8 to 12 students a year through the secondary application, and its first students started in fall 2019.
• HEAL-IM (Health Education to Advance Leaders in Integrative Medicine): a four-year track. Admitted students apply from March, with interviews from April to mid-June. It adds monthly seminars and culinary medicine in MS1 and MS2, quarterly small-group mentorship in MS3, integrative practitioner shadowing and an MS4 elective at the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute with a scholarly project.
• PRIDE Program, founded in 2026: four years of training in LGBTQ+ health, including PACE with faculty who serve LGBTQ+ patients, a service-learning project and a scholarly or capstone project. You apply separately after acceptance.
• Space MED (Medicine, Engineering & Design): a four-year space medicine program, open for now only to matriculating students, who apply with a CV and personal statement. It includes rotations with space medicine fellows at the commercial spaceflight companies SpaceX or VAST, possibly a week at NASA, and a capstone research project.

The Medical Education Building on the Irvine campus, 65,000 square feet according to the catalogue, is the hub for nearly all non-hospital teaching and houses the PRIME-LC, PRIME LEAD-ABC and HEAL-IM programs. Its Telemedicine Center has a 60-seat interactive televideo auditorium.

The Clinical Skills Center on its second floor has 17 exam rooms, each with ceiling-mounted 360-degree cameras and a bedside ultrasound machine, watched from 14 monitor stations through one-way glass. The Simulation Center has a full-scale operating room, an emergency trauma bay, an obstetrics suite and a critical care unit, with two debriefing rooms.

Ultrasound teaching grew from a four-week emergency ultrasound elective that UC Irvine students have taken since 2003. Its final stage is still an emergency department elective for MS3 and MS4 students, who teach peers, practice ultrasound-guided vascular access and can join research.

ZotUnity's six houses are Vulcan, Panacea, Sekhmet, Artemis, Lonopuha and Apollo. Each is themed on a figure the school links to medicine, such as Panacea, the Greek goddess of healing, or Lonopuha, the Hawaiian god of music, peace and healing. Your house's faculty career advisor meets you at milestones and approves your MS4 schedule, and specialty advisors guide MS3 students through residency applications.

ZotUnity Academics provides peer tutoring by paid MS2 to MS4 student teachers. MS1 students get two-hour reviews ahead of exams and one-hour case sessions every two weeks in groups of five to eight. MS2 adds monthly board-style question sessions, and MS3 brings shelf reviews for the seven core rotations plus OSCE reviews. Students who struggle get letters of support and a learning plan, and anyone can book coaching with a learning specialist, with no limit on sessions.

You can have eight confidential counseling sessions a year with School of Medicine counselors, with referrals beyond that. Counselors run quarterly process groups for each class on topics such as Step 1 stress, and trained peer mentors from MS2 to MS4 offer one-on-one support. Staff also review every exam grade every two weeks to spot problems early.