Third Year
*To continue delivering forward-thinking and innovative programming, Icahn Mount Sinai is launching a re-envisioned curriculum.
ASCEND, the new MD Program curricular name, will debut during the 2024 academic year. For more details, visit our Change Now website.
The Year 3 curriculum at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) combines clinical rotations in core clinical areas with 10 weeks of elective time for career exploration. The schedule is comprised of four 12-week modules offering exposure to ambulatory care across the lifespan, anesthesiology, internal medicine, neurology, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, and surgery.
Innovative opportunities in the Year 3 curriculum include:
- Practical and relevant radiology embedded into core clerkships
- Focused career and residency planning and guidance
- Core competency training in quality, patient safety, and health systems science
- Substantial elective time to explore careers and experience different specialties
- Longitudinal integrated ambulatory clerkship for select students
- Option of participating in an additional scholarly year to conduct research
Year 3 Clerkships
Pediatrics Clerkship
This five-week clerkship allows students to care for pediatric patients across a variety of settings including inpatient, outpatient, and in the well-baby nursery. You address issues specific to the newborn period, childhood, and adolescence by focusing on growth and development, and by emphasizing the impact of family, community, and society on child health and well-being.
Obstetrics-Gynecology Clerkship
This five-week clerkship provides you with opportunities to learn about the particular features of obstetrics, gynecology, and primary and preventive women's health.
Medicine Clerkship
This six-week clerkship enables you to care for adult inpatients in two settings a tertiary care center and a community hospital. During the clerkship, you actively participate in the care of patients and apply your knowledge of pathophysiologic principles to clinical care.
Ambulatory Care-Geriatrics Clerkship
This six-week clerkship prepares you to provide comprehensive community-based health care to individuals and families across the age spectrum. Evidence-based preventive medicine, team-based management of chronic disease, urgent outpatient care, patient advocacy, the medical home, and public health are additional areas of focus in this clerkship. Students also have opportunities to participate in home-based primary care, hospital at home experiences, nursing home care and palliative medicine.
Surgery-Anesthesiology Clerkship
This eight-week clerkship in perioperative medicine allows you to participate in the comprehensive care of the surgical patient from the perspectives of surgery and anesthesiology, including initial surgical work-up, pre-operative assessment and optimization, anesthetic management, surgery and the surgical environment, and post-operative care including acute pain management. You will experience inpatient and outpatient venues for surgery and anesthesia, as well as the surgical ICU.
Neurology Clerkship
This four-week clerkship prepares students to perform a competent neurologic examination, recognize and contextualize abnormal findings, formulate a neurologic differential diagnosis, design evidence-based initial neurologic diagnostic testing, and develop an evidence-based neurologic management plan.
Psychiatry Clerkship
This four-week clerkship focuses on learning the presentations of major psychiatric disorders, becoming familiar with psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatment options, formulating psychiatric diagnoses and treatment plans, and learning about the rapidly emerging advances in neuroscience that promise substantial improvements in the treatment of psychiatric illnesses.
Online Radiology Clerkship
The Online Radiology Course (ORC) consists of 18 required and 1 optional interactive virtual patient cases, which encompass the learning objectives of the Association of University Radiologists (AUR) and the Alliance of Medical Student Educators in Radiology (AMSER) National Medical Student Radiology Curriculum. Each of the 18 modules has been correlated with the core clerkships and teaches a patient-centered approach to imaging, fosters self-directed and independent study, and builds clinical problem-solving skills.
Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship
Interclerkship Ambulatory Care Track (InterACT): This 12.5-week integrated clerkship provides select third-year medical students with a longitudinal clinical experience in the foundations of ambulatory medicine and chronic illness care. It prepares and develops students committed to the practice of longitudinal patient-centered care who are able to navigate health care systems while addressing the social, economic, and cultural factors that affect chronic illness care in an urban setting. Additionally, it enables students to cement meaningful relationships with mentors in several fields of medicine, as well as to learn and teach humanism, advocacy, and interdisciplinary care in the context of caring for the medically disenfranchised.
InFocus
InFocus weeks are innovative and immersive courses taught through all four years of the ISMMS program. The sessions provide core curricula in topics critical to medical practice and biomedical research in the 21st century. During Year 3, the three InFocus weeks emphasize patient safety and quality, health system science, reflection, and career planning.
- Patient Safety, Quality and Health System Science: This InFocus theme is designed to expose you to principles in patient safety, quality and health system science through practical experiences and small-group discussions. Human and system elements of error, models for improvement, and theories of change will serve as the foundations of this course. You will have an opportunity to examine and analyze process maps to improve patient outcomes.
- Reflection: These facilitated sessions are opportunities for you to process and understand your clinical experiences in an effort to inform your future actions. This longitudinal experience is designed to promote learning from experience, encourage dialogue and sharing of perspectives, promote professionalism, and support reflective practice.
- Career Planning: This InFocus theme is designed to support you in making informed decisions about your career path and navigating the residency application process. You participate in advising cohort sessions, interactive sessions with physicians who have chosen a variety of career paths, and specialty-specific small-group sessions.
Electives
Electives facilitate self-directed learning and encourage students to experience new opportunities and explore career options. Students are offered a generous 10 weeks of elective time in Year 3, which is spread across three of the four modules. For more information, please visit Electives and Experiences.