Traditional Match Day celebration returns
Medical students participating in the residency Match were able once again to gather in-person to share their results.
Match Day is one of the most anticipated events in a medical student's journey. It's the day graduating students find out where they'll spend the next three to seven years training in residency programs.
Today at 9 a.m. PT at the University of Washington Husky Union Building (the HUB) in Seattle, and at WWAMI Foundations sites in Spokane, Washington, Laramie, Wyoming, Anchorage, Alaska, Bozeman, Montana and Moscow, Idaho, the graduating class of 2022 opened sealed envelopes.
Inside were personalized letters from the National Resident Matching Program. The students learned the city and program where they had placed.
255 University of Washington medical students matched into residencies in 18 specialties, in 36 states. Approximately 45 percent of those students matched into primary-care specialties, including family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.
NRMP is a U.S.-based private non-profit non-governmental organization created in 1952 to place medical school students into residency training programs. This year, 42,000 applicants were matched.
Students apply to residency programs at the beginning of their last year of medical school. In turn, residency program directors rank applicants. A match occurs when a program accepts a student’s application.
This year there was cause for even more celebration as COVID social distancing protocols have eased and the traditional Match Day celebration could once again be in-person, albeit masked.
For the past two years graduating students were unable to hold in-person Match celebrations due to the COVID pandemic, and commemorated the day virtually through Zoom.
Written by Kim Blakeley.
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