The University of Maryland School of Medicine MD program

Each pre-clerkship course is taught jointly by basic science and clinical faculty: Brain & Behavior, for example, draws on neurology, neuroscience, anatomy, pharmacology, pathology, anesthesiology, pediatrics and psychiatry. Lectures are optional, but each course marks some sessions, such as small groups, as mandatory. Participation, which can include team-based learning quizzes, counts for up to 15% of a course grade.

Some subjects run through every course. Embedded content leads, faculty who follow one theme across the curriculum, oversee threads such as anatomy, radiology, pharmacology, nutrition, health disparities and planetary health. Nutrition, for instance, starts in your first course and includes learning to take a nutritional history from dietitians.

In the clinical years you learn mainly on hospital teams and in clinics, and most clerkships add lectures, conferences or weekly teaching sessions. Practice of Medicine continues with an Introduction to Clerkships and four day-long sessions on topics such as interprofessional care and career planning.

School policy keeps required pre-clerkship activities to weekdays between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. and caps them at 30 hours a week, with Introduction to Medical School the one exception. Most required classes and small groups run from 8 a.m. to noon, with occasional afternoon sessions.

You should also get at least 15 hours a week of unscheduled daytime, on average, for self-directed study. Practice of Medicine adds a weekly small group and, from October of year 1, three to four hours a month of service learning. The summer between years 1 and 2 has no mandatory activities unless you must remediate a course.

Exams come every few weeks: on the tentative 2027-28 calendar, Foundations has exams on August 27, September 24 and October 22, and exams can run until 5 p.m. On clerkships, duty hours are capped at 80 a week averaged over four weeks, with at least one day in seven free.

Anatomy is spread across the pre-clerkship courses rather than taught as one course at the start. Your first course, Foundations, opens with a Foundations of Anatomy unit, and the first anatomy assessment comes at the end of August. You then return to the lab in later courses, so you learn each system's anatomy alongside its physiology and disease.

Labs combine dissection with imaging and models. Brain & Behavior and Digestion & Hormones include anatomy labs, and Skin, Bones & Musculature in year 2 includes dissection in the cadaver lab, with an anatomy assessment in late November.

The Maurice N. Reid, MD '99 Anatomy Teaching Facility, in the Bressler Research Building, reopened in October 2024 after its first renovation since it was built in 1973. It has 52 dissection tables under surgical-quality lighting, each with a touch-screen computer for electronic atlases, plus a reading room for medical images, 3-D graphics packages and anatomical models. Medical students use it in all four years.

Your first patient-facing practice is in Practice of Medicine I in year 1. In weekly small groups a clinician preceptor coaches you through patient encounters, interviews, physical exams and oral presentations. You also work with standardized patients and with physical exam teaching associates, people trained to teach examination. Year 1 covers the medical interview and the neurological, head, eyes, ears, nose and throat, and abdominal exams.

Year 2 adds the cardiac, lung, musculoskeletal and genitourinary exams. Your encounters are video-recorded so you can review them with feedback from faculty and the standardized patients. Practice of Medicine also includes longitudinal clinical sessions with faculty, and you may be placed at an off-campus site for it.

Electives can add earlier clinical work. In the Combined Accelerated Program in Psychiatry, which dates from 1970, you interview patients and shadow across levels of psychiatric care in years 1 and 2. The Primary Care Longitudinal Elective adds mentoring by primary care physicians and a summer externship in an underserved practice.

Before clerkships you attend the Student Clinician Ceremony in March of year 2, where you receive a professionalism pin and take the Student Clinician Oath. You also attend clinical skills workshops and small groups on patient safety and professionalism.

Courses are graded on one of two scales. The four-tier scale runs Honors, High Pass, Pass and Fail, with pre-clerkship cutoffs of 88%, 78% and 68%. The two-tier scale is Satisfactory or Fail, also with a 68% pass mark. Course leaders set the criteria and tell you how each assessment is weighted at the start of the course.

The school calculates separate pre-clerkship and clerkship GPAs at the end of the clerkship phase. It uses them for three things only: ranking you within your class in the Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the school's letter for residency applications; graduation honors; and Alpha Omega Alpha honor society nominations. The GPAs themselves are not reported to residency programs.

In pre-clerkship courses you get formal feedback by each course's midpoint. School exams are vetted by an Assessment Review Committee, scores arrive within one academic week, and you can review the questions you missed in a secure session straight afterward. Failing Foundations, or more than one required course in a year, means repeating that year.

Clerkship grades rest on your clinical performance and an end-of-clerkship NBME shelf exam, a national multiple-choice test on the specialty, sat on the last Friday. Halfway through each clerkship a feedback meeting checks your progress and your patient log, and every final grade comes with written narrative comments. Family medicine and obstetrics and gynecology also run OSCEs.

USMLE Step 1, the licensing exam on the science behind medicine, has been reported only as pass or fail since January 26, 2022. You must take it before clerkships, and only after passing two NBME practice exams, such as the CBSE, at a threshold the school sets. Without approval, you cannot take Step 2 CK until you finish your core clerkships other than emergency medicine and neurology. To graduate you must pass Step 1 and take Step 2 CK.

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, following the pattern of the tentative 2027-28 second-year calendar, a 2027 entrant would sit Step 1 around March to April 2029, after the switch. Step 2 CK would follow in 2030, after the core clerkships.

• With approval, Step 1 can move up to four weeks past the standard clerkship start; a delay of more than eight weeks needs a leave of absence.
• Failing a shelf exam twice means repeating half of that clerkship's clinical time before a third attempt.
• You must attend at least 85% of required pre-clerkship sessions. Below that your grade drops one tier per extra absence, and below 75% you fail the course.
• Core clerkships other than emergency medicine and neurology must be finished at least six months before graduation. The whole MD must be done within six years of starting, counting leaves of absence but not approved dual-degree time.

Your clinical training centers on the downtown campus. UMMC, the main academic medical center of the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS), shares its 22 South Greene Street address with the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. An enclosed walkway links UMMC to the Baltimore VA Medical Center, and the admissions office says most clinical teaching happens at UMMC, the VA and other affiliated area hospitals.

Your clerkship order is set early in the spring of year 2, through a preference survey and a swap period, and clerkship directors then assign sites. You hear your site at least two weeks ahead and can ask to change it, or swap with a classmate, up to a week before. You arrange your own transport, and the school encourages a car: medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, surgery and family medicine may involve off-site training.

UMMC describes Shock Trauma as the nation's first and only integrated trauma hospital. It credits the center's founder, R Adams Cowley, with first proposing the Golden Hour: the first 60 minutes after an injury, when definitive care is crucial to survival. Its April 2025 fact sheet lists 6,386 trauma admissions, two-thirds of them straight from the scene of injury.

Fourth-year Area Health Education Center (AHEC) electives pair you with a local preceptor and include free housing at the eastern and western sites. In November 2025 the student affairs office's list of off-campus affiliates also named Greater Baltimore Medical Center, Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center, UM Baltimore Washington Medical Center and UM Capital Region Medical Center.

Electives are optional in years 1 and 2, but up to two can count toward graduation. You may take one in year 1 and two in all, no more than one of them longitudinal. To apply, you must pass every Foundations assessment with at least 78% overall. Choices include Medical Spanish, point-of-care ultrasound, primary care, rural health, global health, social justice, medical innovation and the Humanism Symposium.

Students in the first-year CLIMB (Creating Leaders Integrating Medicine & Business) leadership elective can apply to the Dean's Student Leadership Fellows track. It is a seven-course sequence that runs to year 4 and takes up to 12 students a year.

Clinical electives begin in the clerkship year and fill most of the final year. The 2026-27 catalog lists 33 sub-internships and 191 electives, counting a generic off-campus listing for each specialty. Examples include forensic pathology at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and a month-long nutrition elective with obesity and lifestyle medicine physicians and dietitians.

You schedule the final year from January to March of the clerkship year through preference surveys, then add/drop. Away (extramural) rotations at other institutions are allowed only in the final year, usually through the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) service of the Association of American Medical Colleges. You must register them at UMSOM before they start, and a sub-internship elsewhere counts as an elective.

The Office of Student Affairs lists three electives farther afield. In Lusaka, Zambia, you can join the infectious disease service that the school's Institute of Human Virology (IHV) runs at the University Teaching Hospital. IHV was founded in 1996 by Robert Gallo, William Blattner and Robert Redfield. The others are family medicine at AIC Litein Hospital in Kenya and four weeks with a physician at an Indian Health Service center. Travel to countries under a U.S. State Department level 4 advisory is not approved.

Every student completes FRCT, the school's scholarly project course. Its teaching, part of Foundations, covers hypothesis testing, study design, statistics, scientific writing, research ethics and reading the literature critically. Then you choose a faculty mentor and submit a proposal of up to three pages, recommended by May 1 of year 1.

Most students do the research in the summer between years 1 and 2, and the school suggests about eight weeks of full-time work. Original research is written up as a five- to six-page report. Case reports, case series, technical notes and systematic reviews must also be presented at a conference or the school's Medical Student Research Day, unless published with you as first author.

PRISM, the Program for Research Initiated by Students and Mentors, pays first-year students for a nine-week summer project with seminars and a closing research forum. Other routes include the M4I research track in infectious disease and immunology and one- or two-month research electives in years 3 and 4. A research year is possible after the clerkship phase, taken as a leave of absence that delays graduation.

The MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), founded in 1983, enrolls six to eight students a year and has grown to 70. After the two pre-clerkship years you spend three to four years on a PhD thesis, with a linked clinical experience, then return for clerkships; the whole program takes six to eight years. PhD fields include neuroscience, molecular medicine, epidemiology and human genetics, and bioengineering at the College Park campus.

The Office of Student Research lists nine MD/Master's programs, each taking five years, with most master's work in a step-out year after year 3; the master's project also counts as your FRCT project. They are the MPH, MBA, MHA and MPP, and MS degrees in bioengineering, cellular and molecular biomedical science, clinical informatics, clinical research and health professions education. Separately, the School of Dentistry runs a six-year oral and maxillofacial surgery residency that includes earning the MD at UMSOM. It is for dental school graduates, who apply through PASS, the dental residency application service.

Required first- and second-year classes use School of Medicine rooms reserved for medical students during teaching, including the renovated Taylor and Hosick lecture halls and the Reid Rooms, two large collaborative learning spaces. Each house has its own lounge, and a student lounge in Howard Hall, with a kitchen, is open around the clock by card access.

The Standardized Patient Program, run with the School of Nursing, is laid out like a clinic, with eight outpatient exam rooms, four inpatient spaces, two counseling rooms and high-definition cameras. The MASTRI Center offers high-fidelity simulation and skills training. The surgery, anesthesiology and obstetrics and gynecology departments opened it in 2006 with the U.S. Air Force Center for Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills (C-STARS).

The Health Sciences and Human Services Library seats more than 800 and has 41 group study rooms and an Innovation Space with 3D printers.

You join one of four houses, the school's learning communities, named for alumni Eva Dodge, Julius Friedenwald, Mario Garcia-Palmieri and Lois Young-Thomas. Dodge was the first woman intern at the University of Maryland Hospital, and Young-Thomas the school's first Black female graduate. A senior faculty educator heads each house, and each of its eight core faculty mentors takes five new students a year, so your group spans all four classes.

Student Success, in the Office of Medical Education, offers academic counseling in every year and helps you plan study for Step 1 and Step 2 CK. Peer Learning Partners, older students paid through Federal Work-Study, run review sessions and tutoring. Some incoming students are invited to a three-week Prematriculation Summer Program to preview the course, and the Academic Enrichment Program gives structured support, with elective credit, to students at academic risk.

The Peer Support Network offers confidential conversations with student volunteers trained as Certified Peer Educators by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). The campus Student Counseling Center offers same-day appointments. If you complete the pre-clinical courses but cannot or no longer wish to continue, the school offers a Master of Science in Medical and Health Studies as an exit route.