“I want to welcome you to medicine’s March Madness,” Medical School Dean Deborah Powell, M.D., told the fourth-year medical students and their families and friends gathered at the McNamara Alumni Center on March 15 for Match Day.
A rite of passage on every medical school campus, Match Day is when fourth-year medical students, some with families in tow, anxiously gather to simultaneously open small white envelopes whose contents reveal where they will complete their residency training.
Slightly more than half of the 225 medical students graduating this year will stay in Minnesota: 50 will pursue residencies at the University of Minnesota, 10 at Hennepin County Medical Center, 15 at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, and the remaining 37 at Bother residency programs in the state, including several affiliated with the University.
A large number in the class chose primary-care specialties, but the percentage continues to shrink, with 42.3 percent going into primary-care residencies this year, 45.8 percent in 2006, and 48.8 percent in 2005. Other top specialties were emergency medicine (19 students matched); pediatrics, with 13 matches; and obstetrics and gynecology, also with 13.
“You are our ambassadors,” Ted Thompson, M.D., neonatologist and director of clinical education for the Medical School, told the students, holding up his own Match Day envelope from 1969, which placed him at the University.
