Special Study Elective

1-4 units

Clinical special study electives allow students to participate in a clinical experience not offered in the Electives Catalog. Clinical special study electives tend to be highly specialized and focused on a particular subspecialty, individual procedure, or population; they may also qualify as interdisciplinary. Non-clinical special study electives allow in-depth study of a topic of particular interest to the student, related to the study or practice of medicine as appropriate for credit toward the MD degree. They tend to be projects that do not qualify as clinical, but are more involved than reading and writing about a topic (for example, a past project involved intensive study of a foreign language focused on patient care, including both independent study and conversational practice with community groups and native speakers). Non-clinical special study electives cannot be used as a secondary occurrence of a reading elective, cannot be research-based, and cannot be related to any other independent elective experience (for example, students may not use a non-clinical special study elective to prepare for an EXPLORE research project).