Academic and Faculty Affairs

The Office of Academic and Faculty Affairs is responsible for both faculty and curricular issues.  Academic Affairs develops, manages, and coordinates the curriculum; sets yearly academic and course schedules; and sets student schedules for third and fourth-year clinical rotations and electives.

• Academic and Faculty Affairs:

  Curricular administrative support is provided through this office, including for the Medical Student Education Committee, its four subcommittees and ongoing compliance with LCME accreditation and curriculum standards.  Additional support includes faculty recruitment and development, staff support for electives and interdisciplinary courses such as the Doctoring Course series, and assessment of the curriculum through analysis of student evaluation and feedback of courses and faculty.  This office administers all National Board of Medical Examiners subject exams delivered at the College of Medicine; provides support for career selection guidance, the residency application process, and preparation of the Medical School Performance Evaluation.
• Our Mission:

  To provide leadership in fostering a vital, active learning community that enables students and faculty to achieve excellence and develop a commitment to lifelong learning.

Curriculum Overview

Find out more about the curriculum.

View the academic calendar. 

• Video Transcript: Quillen College of Medicine: Inside the T.R.A.I.L.S. Curriculum

  [Music]

  [Speaker: Dr. Ivy Click]

  At the Quillen College of Medicine,

  our curriculum is built to train future physicians to care for the people and communities of the Appalachian region and beyond.

  Our goal is to provide the best possible experience for students as we prepare them for a rapidly changing health care landscape.

  Our curriculum is called T.R.A.I.L.S. – Team Based Rural Applied Integrated Learning System.

  It's a four-year journey that integrates the basic and clinical sciences from day one, weaving foundational knowledge together with the realities of patient care.

  The first 18 months emphasize active, applied learning.

  Students engage in team-based learning, case-based discussion and simulation while building early clinical skills through our preceptorship experiences.

  They're seeing patients in real clinical settings within their first year of medical school.

  During their time at Quillen, students train alongside nursing, pharmacy and allied health colleagues in a robust interprofessional education program.

  Because modern medicine is a team sport, the clinical phase, they rotate through our partners at Ballad Health, the VA Medical Center and our ETSU Health clinics, gaining hands-on experience across every core specialty.

  For students drawn to rural practice, the Rural Primary Care Track offers deeper immersion in the communities that need physicians most, and through Tri-TRAILS, qualified students can complete their MD in just three years on an accelerated pathway into primary care residencies right here in our region.

  From the first day in the classroom to the moments our students match into residency, every part of the Quillen curriculum is designed to develop competent, compassionate physicians ready to serve.

  This is medical education with a mission.

  And it starts here.

  [Speaker: Dr. Evann Fowler]

  So, one moment in team-based learning that stuck with me, the goal with these groups is they try to put students who have different backgrounds together, and when we first learned EKGs, one of my group members was a paramedic before he started medical school.

  So, we had the really good theoretical understanding from our professor, our Ph.D., who was teaching us.

  But then we also had that practical, real-world experience to help us when we were getting our feet wet.

  Going to medical school at Quillen, a lot of the patients we take care of are medically underserved.

  And so being in those clinics for underserved patients, working with that patient population, people are so grateful.

  The medicine is so interesting.

  And you can make a huge difference for those people even as a student.

  So that's really inspired me to keep doing that kind of work when I'm out of residency and I'm an attending.

  [Speaker: Maggie Francisco]

  Something about team-based learning that really surprised me and stuck with me is the diversity of backgrounds that the students here at Quillen have that really make us such a well-rounded team.

  In the team-based learning opportunities, we have students from nursing who have been paramedics, from public health, even finance backgrounds.

  And that diversity of thoughts and background is really helpful for learning new things.

  So there were a lot of times when I came into class convinced that I really understood the topic.

  And then one of my team-based learning members, they explained it in a new way that completely cracked it wide open for me and really drove home the most important points.

  And so it really showed me that medicine is really a team-based sport.

  All the faculty members here at Quillen are so wonderful and very encouraging.

  And something that really stuck out to me whenever I first started here as a student is how willing they are to go above and beyond to help us with topics that we might be struggling with.

  They're willing to meet, you know, outside of class.

  They're willing to stay longer to explain topics and not only just educationally, but just to see how you're doing as a person, too, not just as a student.

  So knowing they care about who we are as people and not just as medical students is really, really encouraging for us as students.

  [Music]