It happened!
Today, St. Patrick’s Day, our lucky medical students opened the envelopes (or received from the ether on their cell phones) their all-important MATCH. After much anticipation, these 196 young people now know where they will be spending at least the next year, and in most cases, the next few years, of their lives on the winding road to becoming physicians and physician-scientists.
In addition to linking them with a new institution, Match Day offers hints on who may become the students’ new mentors and exemplars, and how they will be spending some 80 hours each week for at least the next year and beyond.
Based on the reactions that I saw, most of our students matched at sites that they really desired. There was great joy in the room. And why not? Our students sought out, and are sought after, by the best places. We are so proud of them.
Here are some Match Day 2017 fun facts:
• Top residency choices were internal medicine, emergency medicine, ophthalmology, orthopaedic surgery, and radiology.
• Thirty-seven percent of the class will go into primary care specialties.
• Twenty percent will continue serving the Cleveland community through residencies at University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, and MetroHealth Medical Center; 26 percent will remain in Ohio.
• As in years past, our students matched at top programs throughout the United States including Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Mayo Clinic, Massachusetts General, and New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center.
From this point, it seems a relative downhill slide to graduation and donning the blue robes with three green velvet stripes – green being the academic color of medicine as well as the color of life. The students will then walk across the stage of magnificent Severance Hall, receive their diplomas, don the doctoral hood, and seemingly in a flash, will become SOM alumni. All of this, and more, begins today.
Congratulations to our graduating class! May the rest of your journey in medicine be as wonderful as the last four years have been for us! Congratulations as well to the families who have supported them in word, deed, and wallet. It is as much their victory as their sons,’ daughters,’ husbands,’ and wives’.
Soon our students will go forth as CWRU ambassadors to the great residencies they matched today, and they will do us proud. Thanks to all of our faculty members and staff in the School of Medicine for turning out this wonderful class of physicians! We did it!