Because pre-med requirements are roughly uniform among medical schools, Martin says that Harvard will sponsor a spring meeting of college and medical school deans from across the country to discuss changing the requirements across the board.

“The pre-med requirements haven’t changed much in 50 years. There is very little emphasis on human biology, there is very little emphasis on genetics,” Martin says. “The idea is that there might be a reorientation of some of these requirements.”

“We will find a way to finance the meeting so it can be done here,” he adds.

Professor of Medicine Jules L. Dienstag, associate dean for academic and clinical programs at HMS, says that pre-meds should not worry that their current classes may not satisfy future requirements. Any changes would be phased in over a long period of time, he says.

Eugenie C. Shieh ’06, president of the Harvard Pre-Medical Society, thinks that requiring the study of populations will be helpful to undergraduates.

“Incorporating health policy and more relevant issues to medicine into the pre-medical curriculum would be more applicable to students years down the road,” Shieh writes in an e-mail.

Though medical students traditionally do not focus their studies on a specific subject, potential M.D.s will now be expected to. One of the proposed changes to the HMS curriculum is the addition of areas of concentration, such as health policy, global medicine, community medicine and clinical research.

Cox says many schools are adopting fields of specialization.

“Students will be able to study those areas of interest right through medical school,” says Martin. “The idea might be to make it required.”

Cox says that students, upon graduation, would have to produce a “scholarly product” relating to their concentrations, such as a thesis or long paper.

ROTATION REFORM

Administrators are also recommending major changes to the third year of the HMS curriculum.

During the “third clinical year,” as it is commonly called, students spend a year rotating among different hospitals, completing clerkships in various areas of medicine. HMS may now have students spend the year at a single hospital.

“That would allow them over a period of nine to 12 months to oversee patients and would allow them to develop a long-term mentoring relationship with a faculty member,” says Thibault. “[The students] would have a more meaningful assessment because they will be in one place long enough for them to be evaluated.”

“The general agreement is that the clerkship model is not serving our students now,” he adds.