While the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis does not offer graduate medical degrees, it does offer degrees as well as training for its graduates who wish to pursue medical work when they fulfill their service commitment in the Navy. Most premed students at the Naval Academy pursue degrees in science or chemistry. Biology classes are also available for academy students. Medical corps work is then available to them once they begin their service.
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is located in nearby Baltimore, Maryland, and is considered the top medical school in the country. The Johns Hopkins Hospital, the teaching hospital for the school, has been consistently ranked as the best hospital in the United States, every year since 1992 by U.S. News and World Report. The medical school was ranked No. 3 in the 2012 rankings. The school was founded in 1876 and has just under 500 medical students.
The University of Maryland School of Medicine is located in Baltimore and was founded in 1807, the first public medical school in the country. Maryland was also the first school to have a residency training program. Currently, Maryland has more than 1,000 medical students, admitting 8.4 percent of all applicants. The University of Maryland School of Medicine has recently launched two research institutes, the Institute of Human Virology and the Institute for Genome Sciences.
Part of the historically black Howard University, the College of Medicine is located in Washington, D.C. The Howard College of Medicine is part of the Howard University Health Sciences Center, which also includes colleges of dentistry, pharmacy, nursing and allied health sciences. The medical school was founded in 1868. One of the first faculty members was Dr. Alexander Thomas Augusta, the first African-American to serve on a medical school faculty in the United States.