MSAT Degree Requirements and Curriculum

Degree Requirements

The MSAT degree requires 58 units of rigorous coursework delivered full-time over two academic years. Students are enrolled for the summer, fall, and spring terms.

We "front-load" our curriculum so that the majority of content is delivered early in the first year, leaving the second year to mainly focus on clinical practice. We believe that this structure helps the student develop clinical reasoning skills more quickly since they have the foundation of the content knowledge from thier courses to help them understand and develop rationale for patient care decisions during their clinical experiences. At the beginning of the program, the students have a heavy courseload with relatively fewer clinical experience hours (~18-20/week) vs. the end of the program which is fully immersive (40 hours+/week).

Each semester includes a seminar in which students work with their preceptors on projects to help them "bridge" what they are learning in their coursework with their clinical experiences to integrate best evidence with the context-specific constraints that they encounter during their clinical rotations.

The final culminating experience requires the student to demonstrate their ability to develop and adminster a care plan for a patient with substantial functional limitations that they work with during their immersive clinical experience. They must show their effectiveness through the patient's improvement in important clinical- and patient-reported outcomes.