The Gateway Curriculum consists of three phases over four calendar years. In addition, Gateway’s EXPLORE component allows students to examine their own career goals and to gain exposure to areas of interest. See the MD program’s post-2020 enrollment curriculum page for the latest in curricular developments.
Phase One begins with a 1-week orientation/transitional period called Gateway to the Curriculum.
Phase One continues with seven Foundational Science Modules of various length (46 weeks total) incorporating the basic sciences (e.g., anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, etc.), clinical skills, and Physicians, Patients, and Systems and Society content (including professional identity formation, community engagement, social, behavioral, and health systems content). Modules will center on the functions (primary physiological organization) and forms (secondary anatomical organization) of the human body in an integrated fashion, including the basic and clinical sciences and the impact of the social and health systems sciences. Each module will have a similar large-scale structure to facilitate consistency and familiarity.
The majority of instruction in Phase One will typically occur in the mornings, Monday through Friday. Activity-orientated content will occur typically two to three afternoons per week (e.g., clinical skills training, activities directed at students’ areas of passion such as community engagement, advocacy, education and research).
Evidence-based, active learning strategies and educational technology are used to augment medical student engagement and learning (e.g., team-based learning, case-based collaborative learning, flipped classroom strategies, laboratories).
During three 3-week Clinical Immersions (9 weeks total), students will rotate through three clinical environments: Inpatient, Outpatient (including urgent/emergent care) and Perioperative/Periprocedural/Procedural (including Labor & Delivery). During Clinical Immersions, attention will be given to clinical skills, the social and health systems sciences and professional identity formation.
A four-week EXPLORE experience during Phase 1 gives students the opportunity to probe their interests early in training.
Phase One concludes with a Capstone course to solidify and consolidate knowledge and skills, and to further prepare students to perform successfully in clinical clerkships.
Phase One includes five weeks of unscheduled time.
Phase Two consists of six 8-week core clinical clerkships where students rotate through internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, OB/GYN, neurology and psychiatry.
The components of the core include preparation, clinical immersion and consolidation. In preparation, each clerkship begins with one week of specialty-specific foundational science, consisting of purposeful reiteration and expansion of prior material (helical learning) and new material. This material will be taught in a “signs and symptoms” framework to facilitate core knowledge transfer to clinical reasoning. During clinical rotations, the student joins the patient care teams with more engagement in advanced clinical work than Phase One. Finally, during consolidation each clerkship ends with a one-week period for revisiting concepts, filling in knowledge gaps, and including assessments, reflection, coaching and community (ARCC).
Students particularly interested in a career in science have the option of completing 8-16 weeks of research beginning in January of Phase Two.
During Phase Three, schedules and activities are tailored to individual passions and career aspirations. All students are required to complete a 4-week Internal Medicine Advanced Clinical Rotation. Students are required to complete two additional 4-week Advanced Clinical Rotations (ACRs), which are subinternship-like experiences in areas selected by the students and two 4-week Keystone Integrated Science Courses (KISCs). KISCs provide deep explorations into the science of a broad array of topics (basic, clinical, social and health systems science), will be transdisciplinary and will take students from cell to society around an important or emerging area. Up to eight weeks of credit-bearing study/preparation time may be used for USMLE exams: Step 1, Step 2 CK and Step 2 CS. Finally, students are required to complete a 4-week Gateway to Residency (a.k.a. Capstone) Course early in their graduation year. The remaining eight months are entirely elective. It is anticipated that the vast majority of our students will do some form of research early in Phase 3 that is focused in an area of their interest.
By the completion of Phase Three, students will complete their achievement of the core competencies and develop competencies and an identity consistent with their chosen profession. They will dive deeply into the foundational, clinical, social and systems sciences relevant to their chosen field. They will continue exploration of their passions and have opportunities to take deep dives into those passions.
Four weeks of university holiday time occur during Phase 3 and students may elect to take up to 4 additional weeks of unscheduled time.