The eight-year MD program in clinical medicine, i.e. the eight-year successive undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral program in clinical medicine in its full name, is a featured degree program at Southern Medical University (SMU) which is among the first eight key universities accredited to offer such a program in China. Notably, SMU is also the only independent medical institution that offers the eight-year successive degree program. The program was initially launched in 2004, and since then 10 classes of graduates have successfully got their MD degree. It is also noteworthy that the employment rate of the graduates out of this program have reached 100% for the past five years, with 95% of them serving in first-class hospitals.

Once you take the eight-year MD program at SMU, you will start an exhilarating and fulfilling journey of academic learning. In the first two years of university life, you will receive general education and pre-medical education. Specifically, general education on humanities helps you internalize those outstanding human cultural achievements into part of your personality, temperament and cultivation through knowledge imparting, environmental edification and self-practice, laying the first cornerstone for the cultivation of an excellent physician of warmth; pre-medical education, i.e. early clinical education, will enable you to feel the physician’s life in a medical society, thus shaping your initial perception of the profession and laying the foundation for further medical courses.

In the following six years, you will continue to grow in medical knowledge by curriculum learning and self-exploration. The so-called “Integrative Basic-Clinical Medicine Module” constitutes the main theme of this stage. The module aims to integrate your prior medical knowledge, most probably departmental and fragmental, and to help you develop a dialectical and holistic view of the various organ systems of the human body. The “Integrative Basic-Clinical Medicine Module” is also supplemented with an array of “PBL courses” flexibly interspersed in between, with an aim to cultivate your interest in self-exploration, group discussion and analytic induction by introducing numerous real clinical cases into the course teaching. In a small class of 10 people, everyone has the opportunity to present and report their learning experience, and to share their reflections and insights about the cases in class discussions.

In addition to the busy academic life, there is also a cozy communal life waiting for you, featured by rich extracurricular activities like, for example, the Young Physicians Association, a student club with its members coming out of the eight-year MD program. Here, you can talk to seniors in a relaxing space called “Music Box” and reap invaluable experience and lessons from your predecessors; you can also interact with the kindergarten children in the “Teddy Bear Hospital” to eliminate their fear of the physician’s white coats; or, you can enjoy a cultural feast by attending a wide variety of humanity forums and academic lectures of diversifying themes, where different, even conflicting ideas or theories meet; needless to say, there are also great opportunities for you to participate in many academic conferences on medical themes, domestic or international, to communicate with medical students from all over the world, and to strengthen your understanding and recognition of the physician’s identity accordingly. All of these activities are so designed as to prepare you in every possible aspect for your future career success in making an excellent physician.

SMU provides students with a broad platform for international communication, with an emphasis on expanding their international horizons by taking part in a variety of inter-collegiate exchange programs with Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, University of Manitoba in Canada, SCOPE, SCORE, etc. These exchange programs are intended to inspire students to step out of their familiar environment, and to experience different hospital cultures and research atmospheres in more countries and regions.