UC Celebrates 2014 Match Day March 21

Across the College of Medicine, plans are in the works for the annual Match Day event—where medical students will find out where their residency program, and their next three to five years of their training, will take place.

An annual ceremony across the country, Match Day officially starts at noon on Friday, March 21, when the results from the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) go live online.

After a months-long residency interview process, the NRMP does the actual matching, linking the program preferences of students with those of residency program directors.

Match Day at the College of Medicine

At UC, medical students will gather at 11:30 a.m. Friday in MSB E-351, for announcements and photos before the match process begins.

Student names are called, lottery-style, during the event, and students come to the front of the room to open their residency envelope. The matching will be screened live in Kresge and be streamed live online at med.uc.edu.

This year, Dean of the College of Medicine Thomas Boat, MD, will pull the first envelope for the class, with Aurora Bennett, MD, associate dean of student affairs, and Bruce Giffin, PhD, interim associate dean for medical education pulling the rest of the envelopes from the Match Day Box.

Fourth-year student Chris Freese is hoping to match into radiation oncology, but this won’t be his first UC Match Day.

He remembers attending the event in 1996, when his father, College of Medicine alum Michael Freese, MD, matched into the internal medicine residency at Christ Hospital.

"I was little, I believe I was in 4th or 5th grade,” remembers Chris. "My brother and I were packed into the room—everyone was packed in.”

"I think the tradition we have at UC is very unique,” he adds. "You get to support all your friends, you get to see where everyone goes and what happens…it’s a really fun, emotional experience.”

The Residency Side

On the other side of the match program, program directors at the College of Medicine and UC Health will learn the names of their incoming residents a day early, on Thursday March 20.

"We’re always very excited to learn who our residents will be,” says Brian Stettler, MD, assistant  professor of emergency medicine and director of the department’s residency program. "On the day the matches are released, a group of the faculty and I usually gather together around a laptop in one of our offices. We hit refresh again and again on the website, until the list finally pops up.”

UC’s emergency medicine residency program was the first residency program for the specialty and remains a top draw for students. It is in the midst a 4-year process of expanding its resident class from 12 students to 14.

Residency "matches” are determined by rankings from both student applicants and programs. After applying and interviewing with residency programs, students rank the programs by their order of preference, weighing factors of program quality, geographic region and family or personal factors into their list.