And the Envelope Please…It’s a Match!

The soon-to-be graduates of FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine participated in a “rite of passage” during Match Day to learn where they will spending the next years of medical training as residents.


By gisele galoustian | 3/17/2017

The soon-to-be graduates of the class of 2017 in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University participated in a “rite of passage” at the institution’s “Match Day” today to learn where they will be spending the next several years of medical training as residents.

More than one-third of the class of 2017 (22 of the 61 medical students) will remain in Florida to do their residencies, which is a record number since the medical school’s inception in 2011. The graduates will be working at various institutions in Florida including: Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami; Shands Hospital, University of Florida College of Medicine, in Gainesville; University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine in Tampa; Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami; Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg; and FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine in Boca Raton. Medical residencies take between three to seven years to complete depending on the specialty and are required as part of the training for medical school graduates to become board-certified physicians.    

“This is a momentous occasion for our medical students and their families, friends and colleagues as well as for all of us in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine,” said Phillip Boiselle, M.D., dean of FAU’s College of Medicine. “Match Day is the culmination of years of hard work and dedication as medical students and is a testament to their accomplishments as they enter the next phase of their careers as medical doctors.” 

The 61 medical students placed in top institutions such Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, in Boston; Mount Sinai, Icahn School College of Medicine, in New York City; Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta; Cleveland Medical Center, Case Western Reserve University Hospitals, in Cleveland; Duke University School of Medicine in Durham; Naval Medical Center in San Diego; Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis; and New York University School of Medicine in New York City.

“Our students vied for very competitive positions across the country for specialties that included anesthesiology, dermatology, urology, orthopedic surgery, psychiatry, interventional radiology, ophthalmology as well as other specialties,” said Stuart L. Markowitz, M.D., senior associate dean of student affairs and admissions in FAU’s College of Medicine. “Match Day is one of our proudest moments as physicians, mentors and educators and we look forward to many more accomplishments for these outstanding students as we watch them succeed as physician leaders.”

Match Day occurs on the third Friday of March each year at allopathic (M.D.) medical schools in the United States where the results of the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) are announced. The NRMP celebrated its largest residency Match Day ever. A record-high 35,969 U.S. and international medical school students and graduates vied for 31,757 positions, the most ever offered for Match Day. The number of available first-year (PGY-1) positions increased to 28,849 — 989 more than in 2016. The total number of positions filled was 30,478, up 906 from last year, and the total number of PGY-1 positions filled was 27,688, an increase of 852 over 2016.

Promptly at noon during a ceremony at the Live Oak Pavilion on FAU’s Boca Raton campus, the students opened their sealed envelopes containing their residency match results at the same time as all other graduating medical students across the country.

Leading up to the big day, each student lists in order of preference the residency program that he or she seeks to work with and each residency program then ranks its applicants in order of its own preferences. The National Resident Matching Program then uses a computer algorithm, developed in 1952 by Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth, to place students in the program that they prefer. Each residency program at a hospital has a fixed number of first-year positions that they can fill each year based on their accreditation.  

FAU’s College of Medicine is one of 145 accredited medical schools in the U.S., and admitted its inaugural class of 64 students in 2011. In July 2014, FAU welcomed its charter class of 36 residents in its first residency program in internal medicine. The College of Medicine, in partnership with its consortium of five Palm Beach County hospitals, sponsors graduate medical education programs in internal medicine, general surgery and emergency medicine. These programs successfully filled all of their available positions through the 2017 match process.

-FAU-

©