Last updated: July 2024

“CMC? CIC? FS? ABC? What do all of these mean??”

CMC: Clinical Microsystems Clerkship – this is a longitudinal curricular component for your first year and a half where you (along with a group of 4 or 5 other students) learn clinical skills, which are taught to you by your CMC coach. You also participate in a health systems improvement (HSI) project with this group.

CIC: Core Inquiry Curriculum is the part of the curriculum focused on how to understand epidemiology and biostatistics, as well as how to critically assess research papers and how to become comfortable with the ambiguity that often exists in scientific literature.

FS: Foundational Sciences, aka everything in the pre-clerkship curriculum outside of CIC and CMC. This encompasses your didactic learning in all of the blocks below. You will be place in an FS small group with ~11 other students and do the majority of your small group learning in this group.

HSI: your health systems improvement project is a quality improvement project that you participate in with your CMC group to help change or streamline a current hospital process to make it more efficient, or create new systems all together! These projects vary widely by coach and clinical site, but all have the mission of improving patient care through a health equity lens.

GS: Ground School – the first block of your medical school career that allows you to get acclimated to medical school and to teach you odds and ends that don’t quite fit in the other blocks. You learn a bit about musculoskeletal anatomy, the nervous system, and an intro to some commonly seen medical conditions, but the most useful thing you learn in this block is how to start thinking like a doctor.

ABC: Airways, Blood, and Circulation – block where you learn about the heart, lungs, and blood and how things can go wrong with those symptoms, as well as how to come up with a differential diagnosis! This block is split into ABC1 (mostly cardiology) and ABC2 (mostly pulmonology)

H&I: Health and the Individual – this block focuses more on the social and behavioral domains of health. It emphasizes the experience of health and illness from the individual, family, and provider perspective. Other topics include exploring wellness concepts for patients and providers.

REGN: Renal, Endocrine, Gastrointestinal, and Nutrition (or REGulatioN) – the first half of this block is focused on the renal and endocrine systems and nutrition, and the second half is focused on GI diseases.

PHD: Pathogen and Host Defense – this block explores the world of immunology and microbiology, including the basics of the immune system, leukemia/lymphoma, antimicrobial drugs, and more bugs than you ever knew existed.

LS: Life Stages – covers the stages of life, including pediatrics, the reproductive system, pregnancy, and geriatrics.

BMB: Brain, Movement, and Behavior explores the mysteries of the nervous system and is divided into neurology and psychiatry.

DR: Diagnostic Reasoning – the last block before entering rotations. It aims to help students consolidate and organize all of the information learned in the preclinical year and a half into diagnostic schemas and clinical reasoning frameworks for common presenting complaints.

F1: Foundations 1 – the first 1.5 years of medical school, composed of didactic learning in both large and small group settings, a longitudinal clinical skill building course, a health systems improvement project, and anatomy labs. All of the “blocks” mentioned above are part of F1, so are CMC and CIC.

F2: Foundations 2 – typical “third year rotations” which are Medicine (8 weeks), Surgery (8 weeks), Ob/Gyn (6 weeks), Psychiatry (4 weeks), Pediatrics (6 weeks), Neurology (4 weeks), Anesthesia (2 weeks), FCM (longitudinal 1 day every other week), CIEx electives (2-4 weeks), and Sub-I’s (4 weeks).

CL: Career Launch – typical “fourth year rotations” that are planned according to your chosen specialty and also encompass a longitudinal capstone research project (DEEP Explore)

Content adapted from ASW 2025 team