The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health MD program

The ForWard Curriculum is competency-based, and its teachers plan it together across all four years. Besides small-group PaCE Cases, the course catalog lists large-group team-based learning among the curriculum's session formats. In Phase 1 each block builds a theme from basic science to the bedside. Invaders and Defense, for example, teaches the immune system as an army, with foot soldiers, special forces and friendly fire. Alongside it you study the ethics and public health of vaccination and practice the head and neck exam.

The ten threads are each sequenced to deepen as you move through the phases. They cover ethics, evidence-based medicine, health information technology, communication skills, teamwork across professions, patient care, professionalism, public health, quality and safety, and scientific inquiry.

Phase 2 centers on clinical work, with structured sessions such as case-based learning, podcasts, webcasts, readings and national online modules, plus simulation in Surgical and Procedural Care. In Phase 3, several internship preparation courses also use simulation.

Under the school's Contact and Duty Hours policy, approved in June 2025, a Phase 1 block may require no more than 30 hours a week. That counts everything required: lectures, labs, case-based sessions, PaCE, clinical skills and clinic visits with a preceptor, a practicing physician who supervises you, plus required readings and online modules.

The 2024-25 handbook set the limits another way: no more than 21 hours a week in person, plus up to 10 hours online. In person, at most 12 hours could be large or medium group sessions and at most 9 hours of lecture, never more than 3 in a row. Online, 4 hours could deliver new content and 6 could prepare you for flipped sessions, where class time applies what you studied.

The same handbook says the curriculum assumes full attendance, and it makes clinic visits, PaCE sessions, small groups and any session with real or standardized patients required. It allows up to two student-managed absence days, flexible days off for any reason, in each Phase 1 block except the first.

Clinical weeks in Phases 2 and 3 have a much higher cap. Duty hours are limited to 80 a week, averaged over four weeks and including on-call time spent in the hospital. No shift may run past 24 hours, plus a six-hour sign-off for handing over patients, and you get at least one full day off a week on average.

Your first encounter with human anatomy comes in your first block, framed as part of the privileges and responsibilities of becoming a physician. The technical standards require every student to be able to observe anatomic dissection and to take part in dissecting a human cadaver. The June 2025 contact-hours policy lists laboratory and dissection sessions among in-person teaching activities. This teaching relies on bodies given through the school's Body Donor Program.

The Radiology department says it builds radiology into every Phase 1 block through dissection and interactive large-group sessions, to reinforce what you learn in lectures and dissection. In Integrated Radiology and Anatomy sessions you use your anatomy to identify normal structures and signs of disease.

Anatomy returns later if you want more. Clinical Anatomy and Radiology, a two-credit Phase 3 course, is built on complete dissection of human cadavers, from the head and neck to the limbs and pelvic outlet. Practicing surgeons add surgical teaching, you interpret cross-sectional scans, and you produce an oral presentation and a dissection video. An independent advanced dissection course, by instructor consent, lets you study one region in depth.

Your first block, Patients, Professionalism and Public Health, opens with Faces of Patients and has you practice patient-centered interviews with real and standardized patients. You learn how the social history reveals the circumstances behind a patient's health. The block ends with Faces of Physicians, on how doctors advocate for individual patients and whole populations.

Phase 1 also includes a three-semester longitudinal experience in outpatient clinics in Madison and surrounding counties. The 2024-25 handbook describes MoMS-Dando a Luz, in which preclinical students follow a pregnant patient under the supervision of a UW faculty or community physician. You can also volunteer at MEDiC's student-run free clinics in the Madison area, alongside pharmacy, nursing, physical therapy and physician assistant students.

Full-time clinical work starts in January of year 2, after a two-day orientation called Transition to Clinical Settings (December 15–16 in the 2026-27 calendar). It includes a panel of third-year students on using clerkships to explore specialties.

Assessment is tied to the school's graduation competencies, grouped in six domains such as Patient Care and Professionalism. The current competencies page lists 21, while the 2024-25 handbook counts 20. At least once a semester you and your coach rate your progress. A Competency Review Committee looks more closely at anyone rated as progressing with some concern, or where student and coach disagree.

The 2024-25 handbook describes Phase 1 midterms set by the phase's teachers and basic science exams from the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME). It also requires an NBME subject exam, or shelf exam, in each Phase 2 block: a national multiple-choice test of clinical knowledge in a specialty. Phase 2 uses Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), hands-on tests of communication, physical examination, procedures and interpreting lab results. In the handbook, grades typically combine these with assignments, professionalism and clinical assessments based on observation by supervising faculty, fellows and residents.

Required courses are pass/fail: the 2024-25 handbook grades them all satisfactory or unsatisfactory. It also builds a comparative standing, the Cumulative Comparative Performance, from Phase 2 results only. No numeric rank is released. Your standing appears as a graph on your Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), the school's summary of your performance for residency programs, with verbatim comments from your clinical teachers.

Step 1, on the sciences basic to medicine, has been pass/fail since January 26, 2022, while Step 2 CK, on clinical knowledge, is still scored. For MD students, LCME accreditation is what makes you eligible to take them, though DO and international students qualify by other routes. You must pass both to graduate. The 2024-25 handbook requires you to pass Phase 1, the clinical parts of Phase 2 and every Phase 2 shelf exam before Step 1. You must then take Step 1 before Phase 3 coursework begins.

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. The USMLE has also encouraged schools to review rules that restrict when students must take the exams.

On the current schedule, projected from the 2026-27 calendar, an August 2027 entrant would finish Phase 2 in December 2029. Under the 2024-25 handbook's deadlines you would then attempt Step 1 by March 1, 2030, and Step 2 CK before the 2030-31 MSPE release. Both fall after the change, and the school's Phase 3 timeline puts the two exams in Phase 3's first spring. A current school page says no longitudinal (part-time) electives are allowed in that semester, leaving January to early February for Step 1 preparation.

• A June 2025 policy requires feedback that does not count toward your grade at the midpoint of every Phase 1 and Phase 2 block. It comes from your coach in Phase 1 and from a clinical team member in Phase 2.
• You must pass every course in a phase to move on, and failing the same course twice means dismissal (June 2025 Advancement policy).
• If you fail a USMLE Step, the 2024-25 handbook allows two more attempts, with a pass needed within a year of your first try. A third failure means dismissal.

The school calls its clinical network the Statewide Campus. Hundreds of physicians across Wisconsin teach as volunteer community faculty. Rotations and acting internships run in more than 30 communities, organized through academic campuses run with partner health systems.

The 2024-25 handbook describes a lottery for most students. Details go out about four months before Phase 2. You are assigned a year-long schedule, then sites, and Phase 3 is booked through further lotteries from year 3. Unless you are in WARM or TRIUMPH, the handbook allows no more than three of your four Phase 2 blocks outside Madison.

The handbook also lets you ask to stay in Madison, for reasons such as caring for a dependent or ongoing health care. It says housing is provided at sites away from Dane County and south-central Wisconsin.

WARM students spend Phase 1 in Madison, where rural preceptors, a lunch speaker series, a rural health elective and summer externships are on offer. A required WARM Welcome week before year 2 covers rural Wisconsin's history, culture and community resources. A ranked-choice lottery then assigns you to Green Bay, La Crosse or Marshfield for Phases 2 and 3, 28 months in all. There you complete a community health project and rural core days on procedures such as suturing, laceration repair, casting and bracing, and cardiac stress testing.

WARM began in 2007, and a May 2025 university news story expected 327 graduates by that month. A 2023 alumni magazine story put the intake at 26 a year, with Phase 2 core days on ultrasound in Marshfield and a mock disaster drill in La Crosse. The same story said a 20-hour Advanced Wilderness Life Support course in Green Bay became a required final-year core day in fall 2022.

TRIUMPH students apply in the late fall of year 1 and take a one-credit course, Integrating Medicine and Public Health, before starting. A two-week Community and Public Health Enrichment Experience (CAPHENE) in Milwaukee comes in August before year 2. You then meet your TRIUMPH peers every other week, work with your own clinical preceptor, a practicing physician with a UW faculty appointment, and complete four two-credit TRIUMPH courses. The TRIUMPH page currently reports more than 245 students enrolled since 2008.

Phase 3 electives can be UW courses, away rotations at other US or international sites (called extramural electives here), individualized clerkships or research, under current policy. The UW course catalog runs from advanced emergency medicine and inpatient psychiatry to wilderness medicine with backcountry skills. A narrative medicine course helps with residency personal statements.

Teaching in the Classroom electives let you help run anatomy lab and clinical skills sessions, or facilitate PaCE groups, simulation and Integrated Radiology, Anatomy and Histology (iRAH) sessions. A Guatemala Health Advanced Elective, for final-year students with intermediate Spanish, builds on a first-year service-learning trip, with traveling clinics around Lake Atitlan run with the San Lucas Mission.

You can apply for away rotations in your final phase if you are in good academic standing. Applications go through the Visiting Student Learning Opportunities (VSLO) service of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), or directly to the host. An affiliation agreement between the schools must be in place first, and international extramural electives are capped at eight weeks, or 8 credits, in Phase 3.

Under the June 2025 Advancement policy, electives taken in Phase 1 do not count toward Phase 3 credit. School policy does let them count toward a Path of Distinction, an optional focus recognized at graduation. Examples include the one-credit Overview of Rural Health and Integrating Medicine and Public Health.

Research is optional but widely taken up: the school says 90 percent of its students engage in research. Its cornerstone, the Shapiro Summer Research Program, runs between years 1 and 2. About 100 students a year spend 8 to 10 weeks with a faculty mentor in any department, and most projects need no prior experience.

Family Medicine and Community Health and the Department of Surgery run smaller summer programs, for 10 and eight students. Summer projects are showcased at the Medical Student Research Forum each November.

The Path of Distinction in Research, awarded at graduation, asks for at least 16 weeks of mentored research, a manuscript or thesis on original research, research learning activities and local and regional presentations. The Yearlong Medical Student Research Fellowship pays a stipend for a full year of research, usually after Phase 2 once you have taken Step 1. One award is typically made each March.

The Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), the MD-PhD, takes 8 to 10 students a year into a program of about 80 and usually lasts seven to eight years. You take Phase 1, with a weekly Integrated Molecular Medicine course and summer lab rotations, and then Phase 2. The PhD takes 3.5 to 4.5 years, with clinic sessions alongside, before you return for Phase 3. Funding is guaranteed throughout.

The MD-MPH takes five years. Your Master of Public Health year comes either before medical school or between your third and fourth years, with core public health courses and a summer Applied Practice Experience. Some MPH credit comes from public health work within the MD, and you can apply with your MD application or during your first three years.

MD students, including those in WARM, TRIUMPH or the Path of Distinction in Public Health, can add the school's online Graduate/Professional Certificate in Global Health. It has five two-credit online courses and a one-credit field experience, usually in the summer after year 1. Two of the courses, taken in Phase 3, can count as your required public health selectives.

• Path of Distinction in Public Health: a public health course, eight Phase 1 meetings, a first-summer project, a symposium presentation and a learning community.
• Path of Distinction in Medical Education: online teaching modules, a Phase 3 teaching elective and a mentored education project.
• Path of Distinction in Bioethics: two bioethics courses, a learning community, a hospital ethics committee meeting and a supervised research paper.
• Path of Distinction in Interprofessional Practice and Education: a two-year program shared with other health professions students, with learning, leadership and a project.

The Health Sciences Learning Center (HSLC) at 750 Highland Avenue holds classrooms, clinical skills training and the Ebling Health Sciences Library (2024-25 handbook). On its third floor, the Wichman Clinical Teaching and Assessment Center has 24 rooms set up like clinic exam rooms. Ceiling cameras and microphones can record your encounters with standardized patients, whose program began in 1994.

The UW Health Clinical Simulation Program occupies 8,500 square feet inside University Hospital. It has an operating room, trauma room and three-bed ICU suite for immersive simulation, and a wet lab with 13 dissection stations for practicing procedures on tissue. Its dry lab has six laparoscopic training stations, and a virtual reality room holds ultrasound, endoscopy, endovascular and robotic surgery simulators. Both are open to medical students around the clock.

You belong to one of five houses, Bamforth, Bardeen, Gundersen, Middleton or McPherson, which together form a learning community called the Neighborhood. The 2024-25 handbook places you in a house before your first day, with about 35 students from each year per house. Each house has a practicing physician as its academic and career mentor, elected student house officers and its own wellness sessions.

Your house mentor guides you through the Academic and Career Advising Program (ACAP) in three stages: understanding yourself, exploring options, and choosing a specialty and landing a residency. The current houses page sets eight required touchpoints with your mentor from the fall of year 1, while the 2024-25 handbook listed seven. Along the way come the AAMC's Careers in Medicine self-assessments, a career workshop in your first block and Career Advising Day in Phase 3.

Student Academic Success Services (SASS) learning specialists help one-on-one or at drop-in sessions with study skills, test anxiety, tutoring, exam review and USMLE preparation, and run Med*STAR, a short orientation before year 1. University Health Services has psychologists who work only with health professions students, with no cap on sessions, and a medical student ombudsperson offers a confidential route for concerns.