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MATCH DAY 2009

3/20/2009

At Annual Match Day Ceremony, Miller School Seniors Celebrate the Next Step of their Medical Careers

With pride in her steps and excitement in her heart, a beaming Jedlyn Pierrilus walked to the stage to collect her envelope and share her moment of joy with friends, family, faculty and dozens of medical school classmates who had gathered for the Miller School’s annual Match Day ceremony.

After accepting the envelope from Dean Pascal J. Goldschmidt, M.D., Pierrilus opened it hurriedly and shouted to the crowd, “Family medicine, Duke University Southern Regional!” -- her area of specialty and the hospital where she will begin her residency training this summer.

Pierrilus, who’s planning on combining medicine and public policy, also took a brief moment to tout her specialty, telling the audience about the importance of family medicine and describing it as a foundation of health care.

With shades of variation, the open-envelope, read-aloud, shriek-with-joy process played out over and over Thursday as Miller School seniors joined their counterparts across the country celebrating Match Day, the national rite of passage to residency in which fourth-year medical students find out where they will continue the next three to seven years of their medical training under the eyes of seasoned physicians.

And although the ceremony doesn’t show anything but a celebration, Match Day is accomplished through a complex and competitive process (especially for specialties such as dermatology, neurological surgery, otolaryngology and orthopaedic surgery), administered by the National Resident Matching Program. Many weeks earlier, Pierrilus, other Miller School seniors and about 15,000 more U.S. fourth-year medical students applied to their residency program choices. Students, including couples who hoped to go to the same institution, traveled the country interviewing at many of the programs to meet faculty and familiarize themselves with different locations. Students then submitted a rank order list of residency programs to the National Matching Program; for fairness, the ultimate match of student and specialty with the best available institution for the student is done through a computer algorithm.

Some students applying to military programs, ophthalmology and urology learn their destinations earlier, but all other specialties wait for Match Day, an event that’s a lot like  the NFL’s Draft Day.

On Thursday, members of the Miller School’s senior class – 171 strong this year – displayed an array of emotions as they read aloud the hospitals and specialty programs to which they had matched and, in so doing, revealed where they will be living following their May graduation from UM.

 “Oh my God!” “I’m going home.” “This is for you, grandpa.” “Thank you, mom and dad.” The expressions ran the gamut as the parade of students opened their envelopes and announced matches in every conceivable specialty to Johns Hopkins, Yale, University of Texas Southwestern, Cornell, Duke, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and numerous others. Dean Goldschmidt congratulated them and had words of encouragement for what he called “the best medical school students in the country.”

Dean Goldschmidt also publicly praised the Medical Education team led by Mark T. O’Connell, M.D., senior associate dean for medical education, and Robert Hernandez, M.D., senior associate dean for medical student administration.

“This is just an awesome day, not just for me but for all my classmates,” said Sejal Morjaria. “I am going close to home so I’ll be able to enjoy my Mom’s cooking again. “But the biggest thing is the step we’re taking to care for patients. I am going to work hard to take care of my patients to the best of my ability and be the best doctor I can be.”

While Sejal is going on to a residency in rehabilitation medicine at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, Neil Desai will be heading to an internal medicine residency at Rush University in Chicago. He’s always wanted to experience living in the city and made three Chicago institutions his top three residency choices.

“I wanted to live in a big metropolitan city and I have friends and relatives in Chicago,” said Desai, who grew up in Tampa and attended UM before enrolling in the medical school. “I’m excited to see what Chicago has to offer and I know I have been adequately prepared.”

Some students will remain at the institution where that medical education preparation  began. From the stage they made their joy known when, upon learning they would stay in Miami, they shouted: “University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital!”

Jackson was the first choice for Shawn Michael Cantie’s anesthesiology residency. “This has just been a great place. It has unbelievably excellent clinical faculty and a great hospital,” Cantie said. “All of that combined with the weather in Miami – I can’t imagine better.”

Cantie also called his father and grandfather, as many students did for friends and relatives who were unable to come to Miami. “The conversation was both celebratory and emotional,” Cantie said of the call to his hometown of Buffalo.

Where students ultimately match is important because they have to commit several years for the program, and many of them stay in the area to practice medicine.

Residents of Sayre, Pennsylvania, a small borough near the New York border, will benefit from the services of Daniel Goldberg, who was matched with Robert Packer Hospital. Goldberg’s wife Nicole, son Kurt, 4, and 15-month-old quads Mark, Andrew, Tristan and Lorelei were on hand at Match Day to share in the celebration.

“We’re going to a small family-friendly town and we’re all excited about what is to come,” Goldberg said. “I’m looking forward to taking care of patients.”

Although O’Rese Knight already knew he had matched to Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, where he will train in an ophthalmology residency program, he still wanted to share the occasion with his peers.

“For a lot of us this is the realization of a dream,” Knight said. “You come to medical school and there’s a lot of rigors, a lot of hard times, a lot of tests and you’re constantly measured in so many ways – and then you’re a resident taking care of patients. It’s a giant responsibility but it’s what we set out to achieve.”