It’s Match Day!

After months of applications and interviews and weeks of fretful waiting, graduating medical students in New York and elsewhere will gather at their schools at noon to open envelopes and learn what hospital program they have been “matched” with – where they will be residents for the next two to six years, studying and practicing to learn their specialization.

“This is really a big deal for everybody,” the president of the graduating class at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, Tamara Dunn, said. “About a week ago I stopped sleeping as well as I like, waking up at 4:30 with various nightmares. Eating hasn’t been that easy.”

Just more than a year ago, medical students submitted lists of the hospital programs where they want to be residents, ranked in order of preference, to a private nonprofit corporation called the National Resident Matching Program. At the same time, hospitals submitted lists of the students they want to hire, ranked by preference. Much as the old computer dating services, the National Resident Matching Program feeds these lists into a computer that matches each student with one open position. The results are final.

A few students were alerted on Monday that the Matching Program had not found them a match. For them, the last few days have seen what medical professions call “the Scramble,” in which they search an Internet database of unmatched positions and apply for them directly by phone or e-mail.

According to students and professors contacted by The New York Sun yesterday, location and quality of life seem to be leading factors in students’ decisions on where they want to be a resident and in what field they want to specialize – as, of course, is passion for the field.

“What we say around here is ‘lifestyle,'” a graduating senior at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Stanley Frencher, said, explaining that many students were drawn to specializations like dermatology, anesthesiology, or orthopedics, where they might make more money working fewer hours, making these fields more competitive.

General surgery seemed to be a popular choice, students and professors said, especially now that medical residents are limited to 80-hour workweeks and 30-hour shifts, making it a much less grueling residency.

A graduating student at Columbia University Medical Center’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, Rebekah Hofstra, said many students were also drawn this year to more arcane fields: “Right now a lot of the specialties are very appealing because people feel like they’ve trained for so long that they want to do something more specialized than primary care.”

Most students and professors praised the matching system as an efficient and effective way to place qualified candidates in residencies they desire. Last year, 62.5% of American students were assigned to their top ranked residency and 86.2% to one of their top three.