As part of the Medical Education Committee’s (MEC) charge for curricular planning and oversight, the group has recently voted to make several changes to the curriculum that will allow the students to have more time for career exploration and strengthening their credentials before applying to residency programs. With residency applications due in the fall of the MS4 year, there is often insufficient time for students to rotate through specialties that are not included in clerkships. Additionally, students don’t receive scores on the USMLE Step 2 exam until the summer before their MS4 year, and sometimes those scores open or close doors to specialties that students were not anticipating. This prompts the need to pivot to a different specialty and obtain proper letters of recommendation with very little time to spare. Time is also needed for visiting electives, which allow students to explore programs of interest.

Three planned changes are anticipated to start in Fall 2027, increasing the time for students to prepare for residency applications by a total of one month. The first change is to advance the start date of the MS1 year by two weeks. The second change is to move one week of the two-week Patient Doctor Society (PDS) course from the MS1 to the MS4 year. Many of the topics included in the PDS course may be more meaningful to students after they have participated in patient care during the MS3 and MS4 years. The last change is to shorten the Hematology-Oncology (Heme-Onc) by one-half week and to move it to the fall of the MS1 year following the Fundamentals of Medicine course.

In addition to increasing time for the clinical curriculum, moving the Heme-Onc course from spring of MS2 year to follow immediately after Fundamentals will enhance the student’s ability to apply immunology concepts they just acquired in Fundamentals to the content covered in Heme-Onc.

The MEC will monitor the outcomes of these changes and will continue to look for ways to expand the amount of time students have after clerkships so that they can be as prepared as possible for the residency application process.