The mission of the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine is to provide responsive and comprehensive education, research and service of the highest quality in order to meet the health-related needs of the citizens of Texas. In all aspects of fulfilling this mission, the Long School of Medicine is committed to demonstrating particular sensitivity to and focus on the South Texas region while ensuring successful achievement of the institutional priorities to:
- Cultivate a pervasive, adaptive and respectful environment promoting diversity, professionalism, humanism, equal treatment, and opportunity.
- Provide exemplary medical education and training to a diverse body of health career professionals at all levels while fostering a commitment to scholarship, leadership and life-long learning across the educational continuum.
- Build and sustain recognized leadership, and advance scholarship excellence across the biomedical and health-related research spectrum.
- Deliver exemplary and compassionate health care to enhance every patient’s quality of life.
- Serve as a responsive resource to address community health needs whether local or global.
- Attain health equity for the diverse patient population of South Texas.
How we support your development as a physician
The Office for Undergraduate Medical Education (OUME) comprised of Admissions, Curriculum, and Student Affairs provides an academic home with the support and resources you need to facilitate your professional identity development and sustain your career as a physician. It is said that much of the factual knowledge base of medicine will be replaced many times over the course of one physician’s lifetime. However, the medical education cornerstone that provides the supportive and structural framework enabling that physician to learn and discern, analyze and criticize, integrate and extrapolate, generalize and specify, empathize and guide is formed but once in a lifetime.
Our four-year curriculum is carefully constructed and sequenced, integrating basic and clinical sciences and principles, and synthesized contextually via patient cases. Teaching pedagogies combine technology (audience-response systems and high fidelity patient simulation in our amazing Clinical Simulation Center) with touch (standardized patients and early meaningful patient care experiences). Principles of active and engaged learning that foster the development of lifelong learning skills and habits are emphasized. The importance of professional relationships in the development of one’s identity as a physician is recognized and practiced via weekly team-based learning activities, assigned peer/faculty mentorship groups (VERITAS) and inter-professional learning exercises with students from other schools within The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
Your medical education will be supported and enhanced by a cadre of specialists with diverse medical, philosophical, and educational backgrounds, housed in the OUME suite on the fifth floor of the Dolph Briscoe Library that is designed to provide “one-stop shopping” for your educational needs. Your favorite study carrel/nook is but a few steps away from the deans of Admissions, Curriculum, and Student Affairs and the other professionals who sustain the Long School of Medicine’s educational mission.
Our team – including our stellar students – initiates and sponsors many events and activities to complement your formal medical education, including an off-campus orientation retreat, intramural athletics, themed movie nights, dinner and discussion nights with deans and faculty, international electives, student specialty interest groups, large and small group as well as individual tutoring, focused USMLE preparation, and so much more. Knowing that physicians must “heal themselves” as they heal others, we promote student wellness programs designed to promote personal equanimity and immunize against stress.
We are proud of our school’s holistic approach to the selection and training of the next generation of physicians. We believe that both scholarship and humanism must be actively cultivated and nurtured. We are honored and privileged to be your first guides on this incredible and unparalleled journey.