USA Senior Medical Students Await Residency Assignments

Kim Reaves ('09) smiles for the camera at last year's Match Day event.  Members of the Class of 2010 will find out their residency assignments next week.

On March 18, 2010, after much anticipation, senior medical students and residency training program directors across the United States and Canada will find out this year’s Match Day results. The National Residency Matching Program, or Match Day, is the annual event in which future doctors simultaneously learn where they will be doing their residency training.

Locally, the University of South Alabama’s Match Day will be held at 11 a.m. CST, on March 18, 2010, in the Magnolia Ballroom at the USA Brookley Campus.

“Match Day is the culmination of four years of commitment by medical students who have dedicated themselves toward mastering the science of medicine and have embarked on a path to cultivate the skills essential to practice the art of medicine,” said Dr. Samuel Strada, dean of the USA College of Medicine. “The results of this day will have a major impact on the remainder of these students’ professional careers.”

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.

“We have a very diverse senior class this year. More than in recent years, this class has more students interested in Ophthalmology, Psychiatry, Pathology, and Ear, Nose and Throat Surgery residency training programs,” said Dr. Maggi O’Brien, associate dean of student affairs at the USA College of Medicine.

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 will 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.