Pathology Courses in Medical School

The Department of Pathology, Immunology and Laboratory Medicine offers two pathology courses for second-year medical school students:

• General Pathology and Immunology (6 credit hours): This course is taught from late August through mid-October and includes four examinations. It gives students a fundamental basis for understanding human disease. The topics span from cell stress and injury, adaptation, necrosis, apoptosis, inflammation and repair, to carcinogenesis, microbiologic pathology and forensic pathology.
• Systemic Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (9 credit hours): This course runs from mid-October through February and focuses on organ-based disease, combining the disciplines of anatomic and clinical pathology. There are six total examinations throughout this course, culminating in the National Board of Medical Examiners’ Pathology Shelf Examination in February.

Our undergraduate curriculum focuses on pathology problem-solving, and about two-thirds of the course is composed of lectures, while the remaining third is composed of hands-on laboratory and group sessions. A wide variety of teaching modalities are utilized in our undergraduate courses, including:

• Lectures;
• Case-based labs;
• Patient presentations;
• Case-based discussions;
• Robbin’s interactive cases;
• Clinical and autopsy rotations rotations with on-service pathology faculty;  and
• Clinical presentations by students to their peers.