Senior medical students from the University of South Alabama College of Medicine will gather tomorrow at 11 a.m. (CDT) at the Mitchell Center to find out their residency training program assignments.
In this annual tradition called the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP), or more commonly termed Match Day, future doctors at medical schools across the United States and Canada simultaneously learn where they will be doing their residency training.
The Match works like this. After interviewing with several different residency programs - both near and far - students provide a ranking of their top-choice programs in order of preference. The training programs, in turn, rank the students who interviewed. The NRMP matches applicants’ preferences for residency positions with program directors’ preferences for applicants. Each year, thousands of medical school seniors compete for approximately 24,000 residency positions across the United States.
The NRMP also allows couples to form pairs of choices on their primary rank order lists. The couple will match to the most preferred pair of programs on the rank order lists where each partner has been offered a position.
There are 11 distinct residency training programs in the USA Health System. On Match Day, these programs also compete to fill a total of 69 entry-level resident positions in family medicine, internal medicine, med/peds, neurology, obstetrics/gynecology, orthopaedics, pathology, pediatrics, psychiatry, radiology, and surgery. There are a total of 240 residents currently enrolled in these training programs.
