University of Rochester School of Medicine

Academics

4-year modern. Rochester’s Double Helix Curriculum captures the integrated strands of basic science and clinical medicine as they are woven throughout the 4-year curriculum. The focus of our educational program is not merely the transfer of information but the transformation of the learner in a culture providing that ingenious combination of support and challenge that leads to education. Every course is interdisciplinary and, unlike most medical schools, clinical skills training from the beginning leads not to shadowing, but to the start of real clinical work as part of the health care team.Actual clinical cases drive the learning of science. Students return to increasingly advanced basic science in the second, third, and fourth years through an integrated series of problem-based learning exercises. Multidisciplinary PBL cases are used in all courses with usually 3 PBL tutorials per week and an average of 14 lecture hours per week. Clinical exposure begins during the first week of school with an introduction to clinical medicine in the fall semester and the start of the primary care/ambulatory longitudinal clerkship beginning during the first spring semester. This experience includes all the ambulatory components of family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, women’s health, psychiatry, and ambulatory surgery, and is completed by the end of the second year. Inpatient clerkships are completed by December of the fourth year and focus on acute care experiences in adult medicine, women’s and children’s health, mind/brain/behavior, and emergency care.