The UCSF School of Medicine MD program

The catalog describes Bridges as a three-phase, fully integrated curriculum delivered over four years. Its goals are seven competencies: patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, systems-based practice and interprofessional collaboration. For each, a set of milestones defines the progress expected of you through medical school.

Foundations 1 has one set of required courses for everyone, taken in order from a single starting point, Ground School. Each main course pairs a science block, organized around body systems or themes such as life stages, with the clinical and inquiry strands that run through the whole phase.

In Foundations 2 your learning moves onto clinical teams, but the science keeps returning. Every other week you step out of your rotation for the FS-in-F2 (Foundational Sciences in Foundations 2) day. It covers foundational science, appropriate use of diagnostic tests, high-value health care and a family medicine seminar. Sessions use presentations, problem-based learning (small-group work on patient cases) and simulation.

Career Launch is the phase you shape to your career goals. It includes Coda, a three-week spring course in your final year that serves as a springboard into internship. Coda is taught through lectures, seminars, small groups, team teaching and hands-on skills sessions.

Foundations 1 is full time: the catalog sets a minimum of 40 hours a week.

In Foundations 2, block clerkships and CIExes are also full time, at least 40 hours a week. One day a week is kept clear of them for the longitudinal family medicine clerkship and the FS-in-F2 day, which comes every other week. On medicine you admit and follow a patient about every fourth night, and on surgery you take call, covering the service after hours, once a week.

Career Launch is scheduled in two- or four-week blocks. Each is full time, so you take one course at a time; the exceptions are SPAN and some graduate courses for MD/MAS students, who add a clinical research master's. On the medicine acting internship you do an intern's work, admitting roughly two new patients every four- to five-day call cycle while caring for those already admitted.

Anatomy starts in Ground School, the first Foundations 1 course, which covers structural and microscopic anatomy. Neuroanatomy comes in Brain, Mind, and Behavior in the fall of year 2.

Several electives add dissection work. Introduction to Clinical Orthopaedics and Anatomy, a fall course for first- and second-year students, gives you time in the anatomy lab and musculoskeletal dissections by orthopedic surgeons. You learn common conditions of the hip, knee, shoulder and elbow, wrist and hand, and spine, with the examination skills and surgical anatomy that go with them.

Advanced Anatomy and Dissection Skills, a summer course worth one unit (the catalog's measure of course credit), takes you beyond first-year anatomy. You learn dissection technique, such as handling the tools, following fascial planes and identifying nerves, and dissect side by side with faculty in an assigned area such as the musculoskeletal system.

Regional Anatomy Dissection is for fourth-year students and some late third-years. In a faculty-supervised space you review anatomy, practice surgical skills, perform mock operations and reinforce anatomy for board exams. You plan a dissection with faculty, carry it out and present it to faculty and classmates, and the course is open to students not heading into surgery.

Clinical work starts in your first course, Ground School, which begins the Clinical Microsystems Clerkship. The catalog lists the clerkship, with clinical activity, in each of the seven main Foundations 1 courses, so it runs through the whole 18 months.

Foundations 2 immerses you in team-based clinical settings. In the core clerkships you evaluate patients yourself under supervision: taking histories, examining, interpreting findings and helping plan tests and treatment.

Responsibility peaks in Career Launch. Everyone completes a four-week Advanced Medicine rotation: the medicine acting internship, also called a sub-internship, or, if you are considering family medicine, the family medicine inpatient clerkship at San Francisco General. As an acting intern you work under a senior resident and manage your patients as their primary provider for the whole hospital stay. The acting internship must be at a different site from your medicine core clerkship, so you see a second hospital's medical service.

Assessment follows the seven competencies, and to graduate you must show competence in all of them. The catalog page for the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) lists the methods the medical curriculum uses. They are written and laboratory practical exams, structured clinical examinations where you are observed doing clinical tasks, instructor and peer assessments, and self-reflection exercises.

Foundations 1 gives you a single grade for each course, and you must pass all eight Foundations 1 courses, Inquiry Immersion included, to move on to Foundations 2. The 2026-27 catalog lists every Foundations 1 course, every core clerkship and the medicine acting internship as graded pass/not pass.

Physician Identity weeks double as checkpoints. In Foundations 2 and Career Launch they include formative assessments, which give feedback without counting toward progress, and summative ones, which do count. You also review your own performance data.

Step 1 tests the sciences basic to medicine and has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. Step 2 CK tests clinical knowledge and still gives a three-digit score, with 218 the minimum pass since July 1, 2025. UCSF requires you to pass both to graduate.

You must sit Step 1 by the end of the Step 1 exam block and before Career Launch, unless the school approves an exception. Step 2 CK is encouraged as soon as possible after Foundations 2 and advised by August 15 of the year you apply for residency. MSTP students take Step 1 in their second year, before PhD research. In August 2026 the USMLE program announced a move to designated testing dates from January 2029, with Step exams offered less often each year. On the current schedule, students entering in 2027 will sit Step 1 and Step 2 CK under the new model.

• PILLAR, a structured review of the foundational sciences most relevant to practice and to Step 1 and Step 2, is offered to select students with instructor approval.
• In the final year, two- and four-week Advanced Independent Study courses support Step 2 CK preparation. You follow a study plan drawn from your own assessment data and Step 1 results, and the plan must be approved first.
• The Clinical Performance Exam (CPX), a clinical skills exam, must be taken and passed before graduation.
• A school policy on professional behavior sets professionalism milestones for each phase of the curriculum.

In San Francisco, UCSF Health, the university's health system, includes Helen Diller Hospital on the Parnassus campus, Mount Zion Hospital, Mission Bay Adult Hospital, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals and Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital. Catalog course titles place rotations at the Parnassus and Mission Bay campuses.

ZSFG has 397 licensed beds and is part of the San Francisco Health Network, run by the city's Department of Public Health. The San Francisco VA Medical Center, a general medicine and surgery teaching hospital with 111 operating beds and a 120-bed nursing home, has been affiliated with UCSF since 1968.

UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals have main campuses in San Francisco and Oakland; UCSF affiliated with Children's Hospital Oakland in 2014. Pediatric electives are listed at Mission Bay and at UCSF Oakland. Course titles also name Highland Hospital, for medicine, surgery, gastroenterology, pulmonary and emergency medicine rotations.

Kaiser Permanente, which describes itself as a nonprofit, integrated managed care system, hosts core clerkships and the KLIC programs. You can choose to take the six-week pediatrics or obstetrics and gynecology clerkship, or both, at Kaiser Permanente East Bay Medical Center or Kaiser San Francisco. Kaiser San Francisco also hosts a medicine sub-internship and an intensive care rotation.

A longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) is an alternative to block rotations: you follow the same patients and work with the same preceptors across the core specialties at once, for the whole clinical year. Kaiser runs two LICs for UCSF. The catalog also names PISCES, another longitudinal third-year curriculum, and the Model SFGH clerkship program, named for San Francisco General Hospital.

UCSF Fresno is the school's regional clinical campus in the San Joaquin Valley. A 2019 UC Merced news item says it was approved as a branch campus in July 2018; the LCME covers all of a school's campuses under one accreditation. The same item says SJV PRIME students spend their first 18 months at the main campus in San Francisco, then about two and a half years at UCSF Fresno. UC Merced says many of the Fresno program's patient care, teaching and research activities focus on rural health needs.

• Kaiser says KLIC East Bay, a one-year program at Kaiser Permanente East Bay Medical Center, takes eight UCSF students. You train with staff physicians from ten departments, with a weekly program of core teaching, clinical skills sessions and student reports, plus health systems leadership sessions and a quality improvement project.
• Kaiser says KLIC-SF, launched in 2019, takes six students a year, taught by more than 80 Kaiser San Francisco physicians. You have one-to-one attending preceptors in all eight core specialties, immersion experiences in inpatient medicine, surgery, pediatrics and labor and delivery, a KLIC Klass series alongside the FS-in-F2 day and a quality improvement project.
• PISCES: CIExes reserved for PISCES students include a surgical subspecialty rotation in clinic and the operating room, and an emergency medicine and acute care rotation. A third is a career choice elective that you design with a faculty mentor.
• Model SFGH: its community health CIEx takes you on site visits to settings such as a methadone clinic, jail or prison health services and homeless outreach, to see how community organizations support underserved patients.

The first clinical electives come in Foundations 2, as CIExes. Catalog examples include caring for medically complex older adults in a skilled nursing facility, the adolescent and young adult eating disorders program, and pathology from specimen to autopsy. In the San Francisco VA intensive care unit you join the team and present a quality improvement project.

Others cover correctional psychiatry in a jail, prenatal genetics with the Fetal Treatment Center and a writing course, Medical Student as Writer. SJV PRIME students have their own Fresno CIExes, from cardiology and trauma surgery to leadership and clinical skills building.

In Career Launch you take 12 weeks of Elective Skills, and up to 4 of them can be non-clinical. Options in the catalog range from palliative care, clinical toxicology and ECG interpretation to culinary medicine, medical student teaching and an advocacy project course. Fresno adds rotations such as burns surgery, advanced trauma surgery and wilderness medicine.

Emergency medicine is not a core clerkship. In Foundations 2 you can take a two-week emergency medicine CIEx in the UCSF and ZSFG emergency departments or at Highland Hospital. Career Launch requires 4 weeks of acute or urgent care. Fourth-year emergency medicine clerkships run in the UCSF and ZSFG emergency departments and at Highland Hospital, with a sub-internship at Fresno.

Away rotations, clerkships at hospitals outside UCSF, appear as Off-Campus Clerkships in most departments and need approval, typically from the department chair and the dean. The family medicine version places you with a family physician in an urban or rural practice, a community clinic or the Indian Health Service.

The Global Health Pathway, which you apply to, adds a clinical scholars course that prepares a global health scholarly project. An online introduction to global health comes first.

Deep Explore, the 20-week Career Launch project, is required unless you complete qualifying scholarly work during medical school. The catalog's examples are the MSTP PhD in biomedical science or medical anthropology, the JMP master's and an MPH from UC Berkeley or elsewhere. Students exempt from Deep Explore, including JMP and MSTP students, can take GME Pathways, a mentored course in career fields such as global health, health equity and clinical informatics.

The MSTP leads to both the MD and a PhD. You complete the one-and-a-half pre-clerkship years, take Step 1 in your second year, spend about four years on dissertation research, then return for the final five quarters of clinical clerkships. Average time to degree has fallen to 8.5 years over the past decade, the program says. A Medical Anthropology MD/PhD track runs through the joint UCSF and UC Berkeley PhD.

The JMP is a five-year route for a class of 16. You spend two and a half years at UC Berkeley, covering the Foundations 1 material while earning a Master of Science (MS) in Health and Medical Sciences at the School of Public Health. You then join Foundations 2 and Career Launch at UCSF for your MD. The Berkeley FAQ describes the JMP as a regional campus of UCSF.

At Berkeley the science is taught through problem-based learning. Groups of 6 to 9 meet three times a week for three hours with a faculty tutor, working through 40 to 50 real patient cases over five semesters. Your master's work ends in a mentored project written up as a manuscript fit for a journal.

Two tracks prepare students for underserved communities. PRIME-US, the Program in Medical Education for the Urban Underserved, is a five-year track at UCSF and the JMP, with four students per JMP class. It adds a seminar in your first two years and a final-year capstone on underserved care, leadership and community projects. SJV PRIME prepares students to practice in the Valley, with clinical training at UCSF Fresno and a seminar series on the region's health disparities.

The catalog's MD page also lists an MD with a Master of Public Health and an MD with Distinction. It lists an MD/MAS too, pairing the MD with UCSF's clinical research master's, a Master of Science in Clinical and Epidemiological Research since the 2024-25 catalog. It still lists an MD/PhD in History of Health Sciences, but the 2026-27 catalog says that PhD is not accepting applications.

• SJV PRIME+ is an eight-year BS/MD route that you apply to as a high school senior. You earn a BS at UC Merced in one of four majors. You then take Foundations 1 at a regional pre-clerkship campus planned for UC Merced, from fall 2027, and finish with two and a half years at UCSF Fresno.

The catalog's MSTP page says each student is assigned a School of Medicine coach, a clinician educator who advises on every part of your education. It adds that coaches stay with their students through all four years of medical training. In the Physician Identity weeks of Foundations 2 and Career Launch, every student meets their coach to build a learning plan. JMP students are assigned a small group coach when they choose clerkships alongside their UCSF class.

MSTP students also have an MSTP faculty advisor, whom they meet quarterly in their first two years. Physician-scientist advisors help them choose a specialty when they return to clinical training. KLIC-SF students get one-to-one coaching from a KLIC-SF advisor who plays no part in evaluating them.

Kaiser's pages direct students weighing a structured longitudinal program to the school's Student Experience Team in the Medical Student Center. KLIC-SF students who need more clinical sessions to reach the Foundations 2 milestones can take a Clinical Skills Building CIEx, with content set by the clerkship director.