It’s Match Day today! This is the day that 4th year medical students all over the country find out where they will be going for residency. It’s a pretty huge day, and each school has their own traditions/celebrations. My school gave out all the envelopes at about 11:45 and we all opened them together at noon. It’s almost a bigger event than graduation, since this is where we start our careers now. I’m happy to say I matched at my first choice at a program in Los Angeles (seems like a fun place to live for a few years). Talking with my classmates, everybody seems pretty thrilled with their results.
I just really wanted to share this, but if anybody has questions regarding the matching process, med school, or wants to co-celebrate, go ahead!
Congratulations, Almost Dr. audiobottle! So when is graduation? Will you have much time to breathe before you start work?
Damn, you got me reminiscing about my own match day, back in 1983! Got my 1st choice too.
Congrats.
Congratulations, audiobottle!
Mine was ten years ago. We had it in a bar just off campus, and each of us went up on stage and read our match individually. I was the social director for my class, so I was the emcee. It was a blast! And I also got my first choice.
I’m glad they finally wised up and started doing it on Friday. It used to be on Thursday and pretty much nobody showed up to their rotations the next day. (Most of us were told straight up not to be there.)
It’s good news for me, too–my program filled with great people! We may be a family medicine residency in the backwoods, but we haven’t had to scramble in anybody’s memory.
Thanks! Graduation is in May. One more rotation left before I get to walk across the stage. Match Day was moved to Friday this year because they redid the scramble process and called it SOAP. I don’t remember what it stands for (thankfully did not have to participate), but I guess they wanted to give everybody an extra day to sort out the new process.
It’s a huge relief, I have to say. I kind of feel bad for my ER, since I’ll pretty much be checked out, but they’re a relaxed group of people so I’m not too worried.
Do they still say FYBIGMI? (f**k you buddy, I got my internship)
That was the reply senior med students used after match day when asked by their residents to do scutwork.
I actually heard that for the first time tonight. I’m looking forward to using it excessively during the next month.
Are there any other matchees today?
Boy does this bring back memories! I’m a bit chastened to realize I hadn’t even thought about Match Day until I saw your post, being about 15 years removed from mine at this point.
Congratulations on getting your first choice! I got my first choice as well, and it was such a relief to know I would be going to a place I really wanted to be at.
I don’t think anyone still uses the term internship, but otherwise, I believe they do. 'Course, the people who would say that have pretty much been Cookie Monsters for months now anyway.
Cookie Monsters? All this new terminology. Kind of nervous about starting intern year. This is probably a good time to make a PSA: try to avoid going to the hospital in the months of June and July.
Once you get past a certain point in your fourth year, your grades are no longer reported to prospective residency programs. At that point, a certain segment of the class decides that C is for cookie, and that’s good enough for them.
Ok, this is fascinating as hell for me, as I’m sure it is for others, like me, who are outside the atmosphere of medical training.
Tell Me More!
Anything in particular? What the match is, what it’s like to be a student, terminology, etc?
First I ever heard of Match Day was on Talk of the Nation this past Wednesday. Of course, I have no family or friends in the medical field and I’ve never lived near a med school, so it’s not surprising. But it sounds very exciting and fun - a neat way to move to the next phase. Congrats to all you up and coming doctors out there!!
I read an article recently that said it is perfectly possible to graduate from medical school in the U.S. and still not become a practicing doctor because some graduates (<6%) don’t get matched to a residency anywhere. They can reapply for one the next year but the odds go down after being out of school for a year and get much worse after that so a few never get a residency.
How does that happen? Do medical schools graduate some incompetent people or are the ones who don’t get matched the ones that get overconfident and apply to residency programs that aren’t high odds for them and miss? Can that just happen because of plain bad luck?
That must really suck especially if you have massive loans.
Yes! I guess just feel free to share; maybe make a thread, “Ask The Med Student!” or somewhat. 
Regarding not matching… Different specialties have different levels of competition for spots. Things like plastic surgery, dermatology, radiology, orthopaedics, and others are generally far more competitive than internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, and others because of much fewer spots, generally higher compensation, perceived higher prestige, etc. As a result, it is not unusual for a fourth year med student to not match into one of these programs.
On Monday of Match week, we find out if we’ve matched or not, but now where. For students who didn’t match, there is a process called SOAP (formerly called the scramble), where programs with unfilled spots take in students who did not match into their top choices. These can be in any specialty, and are most likely in the less competitive specialties. Students who have to scramble can opt to do residency in a different specialty entirely, or take a year off to do research and improve their application, or get into a prelim or transition year program. These are one year programs that usually give a general surgery or medicine based internship, and are often a requirement in certain specialties.
The students themselves are usually not incompetent. Residencies and medical schools tend to suffer from far more demand than supply. For every student in medical school, there are probably at least 2 students who would have been just as competent but weren’t accepted. Likewise, for every plastic surgery resident, there are probably at least another one or two who would have been an equally competent plastic surgeon, but due to a lack of spots, are unable to get into one.
And yes, it definitely sucks, because loans for medical school are obscenely large.
If there are other questions about medical school, I’d be happy to make this an “Ask the Med Student” thread.
My brother said that the other day, though not to anyone in particular. He is done with hospital rotations as far as I’m aware, though.
He got his on-paper 3rd choice, but after the ranking deadline he was thinking it should have been #2, so it all works.
I didn’t realize schools did matching differently, I assumed it was always the raffle system his used.
BTW, congratulations! Were your envelopes insanely hard to open?
Congrats to your brother! I can relate to the rank list woes. I was agonizing over what to put #1, 2, and 3 for the longest time. It didn’t help that I was abroad at the time with very little in the way of internet connectivity, and had to finalize my decision a full week before it was due.
I’ve heard about a 50/50 split on the all at once vs one at a time methods for opening envelopes. I can’t imagine being the last person drawn to find out where you are going. Apparently at some schools that do that, each person will drop in a dollar and the last person to be called gets the pot.
Our envelopes weren’t too bad, but right before opening mine I had a sudden image of papercutting my fingers and bleeding all over the paper so I wouldn’t be able to read where I was going. Of course then my future residency program would find out and immediately revoke my acceptance since who wants a doctor who can’t open a simple envelope? Thankfully it wasn’t glued too tightly.
There are a lot of ways it can happen. To really explain it, you have to go back to how the whole process works. In the early stages, it’s a lot like getting any other job. You send in applications to places that look like a good fit for what you want on paper. If they like the looks of your application, they invite you for an interview. Most places will take you out for dinner the night before your interview, usually put you up in a hotel, try to make arrangements for someone to take your SO (if you have one and they come with you) around to get a feel for the town. This is the point that it gets different. After interviews are over, each student makes a ranked list of places they would most like to go to, and each program makes a ranked list of students they’d most like to have. All this gets fed into a computer program that uses some kind of algorithm to match things up and maximize both people and programs getting their top picks. All the results are printed off and released to all schools on the same day, so everybody in the country finds out pretty much at the same time. Thus the term Match Day.
So if you only apply to really competitive programs where there are 3 or 4 applicants for every spot, or you apply to normally competitive programs but your grades are a touch weak, or if you come across like an asshole in your interviews and nobody wants to work with you, or if you’ve done a rotation with a program and they all think you’re smart but lazy/whiny/annoying, or if you’re an awesome candidate but there happen to be a bunch super awesome candidates applying the same year, you run a very real risk of not being ranked by any of the programs you rank. In that case, you won’t match and will have to scramble. (A similar list of reasons can apply to a program not filling and having to scramble.) Or you might be ranked, but be #16 in a program with 15 spots. If someone ahead of you on the list hasn’t ranked that program, or ranked it lower, you’re in there, but if everyone ahead of you on their list ranked them #1, you’re down to your second choice, and so on. If you’re low enough on enough lists, you can wind up not matching and having to scramble.
(Or in some rare and bewildering cases, you only apply to one program and get ranked low enough that you don’t get in. And refuse to scramble. And do the same thing next year. And the year after. We had a case like that locally. It was weird, to say the least.)