The Strange Phenomenon of Match Day

You won't find "Match Day" on any list of national holidays or pre-printed on any calendar, but ask any medical student about this phenomenon, and he/she will most likely recoil in anxiety and fear. Every third Thursday or so of March each year, the 15 - 16,000 graduating MD/DO medical students from across the country learn where they are going to move in two short months to pursue their GME (graduate medical education --- "residency") training. Roughly all students receive their fortune-filled envelopes at the same time that day --- 9 a.m. on the west coast and noon on the east coast with the intervening time zones falling in between. Depending on the school's ceremony, students learn about their fate over e-mail, open their envelopes in the presence of family and friends, open their envelopes and announce over loudspeaker where they are going for residency, or walk across stage while their destination flashes on a screen behind them ... fortunately at Iowa, students are called randomly to receive their envelope, place a $1 bill in a bowl (so that the unfortunate last soul to be called gets roughly $150 or so for his trouble), and return to family and friends to quietly reveal their fate. For if one is disappointed with his/her destination, personally announcing the residency program in public may not be particularly comfortable.

Match Day, in and of itself, is the culmination of a very long process. By the prior summer, students have begun to select which field they wish to enter in medicine, everything from family medicine to surgery, internal medicine to dermatology, emergency medicine to neurology, and much, much more. One starts writing a personal statement, gathering letters of recommendation, and assembling a CV and entering this information into an electronic application service that is distributed to all the residency programs one wishes to apply. The programs then select which students to invite for interviews, and after those are completed, soon-to-be-doctors submit their "rank lists" (another anxiety-provoking event) in February, and a massive computer program "matches" students' and programs' preferences and generates the assignment of who is going where for which residency training program. The Monday of "Match Week," students receive a first envelope that indicates --- "yes, you matched" or "no, you didn't match" --- the latter of which is none-too-uncommon for competitive specialties. Imagine four years of hard work that comes down to a single piece of paper ... for those who don't match, Tuesday of Match Week is known as the "Scramble," where students from across the country call around to programs with remaining, unfilled positions no earlier than noon EST (with the help of deans, family, and friends) to compete for the open positions. It is very well possible that you would subsequently match in to a program you never interviewed at or in to a specialty that is not your top choice. But at least you are going somewhere ... knowing full well that you will enter the Match process again the following year. If you receive an envelope on that Monday indicating that you DID match, all is golden --- and you hope it remains so when you find out where you are going on that Thursday.

Match Day this year was March 20. I was nervous for my classmates all week long and was fortunate enough to be able to drive over from Des Moines and celebrate with my friends --- even though I will graduate one year behind, I still consider this group "my" class. When you survive the first two years of medical school together, that's all that matters! As such, here are a few pictures from that day ... Iowa usually does very well in the Match, and I am particularly excited for the great group of future family physicians that are graduating this year. The world is lucky to have them!