Soon-to-be-doctor John Mariano (MD ’17) knew just how we was going to celebrate after he opened his Match Day envelope and learned he got his top choice to stay in Rochester and complete his physician training in URMC’s Internal Medicine-Pediatrics residency program.
“My mom recently did one of those online genealogy searches and found out that she’s 90 percent Irish,” said the 2007 Aquinas High School graduate and Greece native. “So it seems only fitting that we should find ourselves a good spot to have a toast on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m so excited right now. I couldn’t speak more highly of Rochester and this medical school for the opportunity it’s given me. It’s a special place. Just look around at everyone here today and you get a sense of the kind of support we’ve had.”
Mariano, who wants to become an oncologist treating children and adults across the lifespan, is one of 98 fourth-year SMD students who learned where they’ll be spending the next three-to-seven years of their medical training on national Match Day March 17. He is also one of 20 graduates who found out they’ll be staying at URMC for their residencies.
Surrounded by their families, friends and faculty advisers, the SMD Class of 2017 assembled in the Class of ’62 auditorium, and prepared to open their envelopes together at exactly 12 p.m.
“I want to assure you that all of the envelopes have been certified by
PriceWaterhouseCoopers,” quipped senior associate dean for Medical Student Education
David Lambert, MD, in his congratulatory remarks before the countdown, in a humorous nod to the recent
gaffe at the 2017 Academy Awards. “Whether you get your first, second or third choices today, remember it does not matter, because you've got a job!”
Nationwide, a record-high 35,969 U.S. and international medical school students and graduates vied for 31,757 positions, the most ever offered in the Match. The number of available first-year (PGY-1) positions was 28,849, an increase of 989 over last year.
All of the SMD grads who applied for a residency program found slots. Of the Rochester graduates, 34 will stay in New York State and 20 will complete their residencies at URMC. The remainder will be going to 24 states, including the District of Columbia. Some of the schools they’ll be heading to include Yale, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Northwestern, Duke, Brown and Boston University.
The most popular specialty choice again this year was Internal Medicine (19 students), followed by Family Medicine (10 students), Emergency Medicine (9 students) and Pediatrics (9 students). A total of 44 students are entering primary care through Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, Pediatrics, or Internal Medicine-Pediatrics tracks.
See the complete 2017 SMD Match list here.
URMC accepted 166 students from here and medical schools across the country to the open slots in its 26 residency programs. In addition to Mariano’s match to Internal Medicine-Pediatrics, 19 other SMD students matched here in programs such as Emergency Medicine, Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, General Surgery, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Orthopaedic Surgery, and Child Neurology.
Chante Calais-Morgan (MD ’17) said she is thrilled to be joining her husband
Steve Morgan, MD ’16, at Case Western Reserve Hospital/Metro Health, in Cleveland, where she’ll be studying Family Medicine. The two have a five-year-old son, Jeremiah, and have been logging hundreds of miles on their car commuting to see each other since Steve’s graduation last May.
“It’s going to be wonderful to be together completely as a family again,” said Steve. “Rochester has been so supportive to our goals over the last several years, and it’s a very happy occasion today to learn that Chante was able to secure her first choice, and come to Cleveland to start her career.”
Fourth-year student
Stephen Miranda (MD ’17), a native of Long Island, said he “would have been happy with any of his top three choices,” but is ecstatic to be going to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he’ll be studying Neurological Surgery. Miranda plans to practice neurosurgery but also remain in academic medicine and work on improving the delivery of care for patients’ approaching the end of life who have serious neurological illnesses.
“At the heart of providing the best end-of-life care possible is education that cultivates critical end-of-life communication skills in physicians, and I hope to incorporate those skills into residency training and medical education,” said Miranda, who completed the SMD’s
Medical Education Pathway, and recently had an
essay published in the New England Journal of Medicine that describes what he learned as a young medical student while conducting home visits with a patient coping with terminal illness. “We really have a unique educational environment here. Not only are we one of the only schools that offers clinical home visits to medical students in their first two years of school, but we also offer really unique opportunities for students to get involved in academic medicine.”
Miranda’s parents, Louella and Alban, arrived in Rochester from Long Island just in time to see their son open his envelope.
“It’s amazing to witness how hard he has worked toward his dream, and now to really see it shape into reality as his career, that’s all a parent can wish for,” said his mother Louella, adding that she’s also happy to have her son a little closer to their home. “He has really loved it here, but that will definitely be a nice bonus for us.”
Started in 1952 and operated by the non-profit National Resident Matching Program, Match Day is the culmination of months of applications and interviews by fourth-year medical school students, each of whom may have visited a dozen or more hospitals and institutions across the country in search of their perfect match. Each student creates a ranking of their choices. Meanwhile, each hospital and institution creates its own list of preferred students. A computer algorithm compares the lists, crunches the numbers, generates millions of possible combinations and, finally, produces a single choice for each matched student. Click here to see the full National Resident Matching Program® (NRMP®) results of the 2017 Main Residency Match®.