USC Keck School of Medicine

Keck's MD program moves through three phases: Scientific and Clinical Foundations, Clinical Immersion, and Individuation and Transformation. Students begin working with patients in their first weeks, and a health justice and systems-of-care thread runs through all three phases, from first-year coursework to a closing seminar after clerkships.

Sam Teles describes no more than about four hours of lecture a day, all webcast, so most of Sam's classmates watched from home at their own pace. Faculty-written notes for each lecture were the core study material, paired with spaced-repetition flashcards.

HTE@USC (Health, Technology and Engineering) is a joint program with USC's Viterbi School of Engineering. Medical students team up with engineering PhD students, two from each school per group, to design medical devices and processes, with the goal of filing patents or publishing by the end of training.

Sam, an HTE student, valued the weekly sessions with engineers and physician-entrepreneurs on needs-finding, patents, hospital billing, and bringing products to market: a look at medicine beyond the clinic. Fourth-year seminars extend that range with options in biomedical research, digital medicine, global medicine, and policy.

Students train at Los Angeles General Medical Center, the county safety-net hospital; Keck Hospital of USC, a 343-bed private acute care hospital; and Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Sam counts the USC Norris Cancer Center as a third hospital on the same campus, so students see very different patient populations side by side.

Both students single out the clinical access. Sam found county patients uniquely grateful for a student who simply listens, and Dominic Carusillo calls shadowing the most valuable experience, with attendings across specialties eager to teach.

The Health Sciences Campus sits on Los Angeles's Eastside, serving a largely low-income, predominantly Latino community, which students describe as central to their training. Keck reports 32 active community partnerships, and its USC Street Medicine program logs more than 2,000 patient visits a year.

Off campus, the students describe the trade-offs of a big city: shows, hiking, beaches, and nightlife on one side; traffic, crowds, and air quality on the other. Dominic sums it up as "pretty happy with where I landed."