Over 99 percent of fourth-year Alpert Medical School students matched to residency programs March 16. Of 118 students, 117 were accepted into a wide range of programs, varying from family medicine to obstetrics and gynecology to surgery, said Associate Dean for Medical Education Allan Tunkel. This acceptance rate is consistent with rates in the past years at the Med School and the national average for American medical schools, Tunkel said.
Students matched to some of the most prestigious programs in the country, including residency programs at hospitals affiliated with Harvard, Yale, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of California at San Francisco, Tunkel said. From the pool of matched students, 14 students will also be completing all or part of their residencies in Rhode Island, he added.
Thirty-four percent of the class matched into primary care disciplines, which include internal medicine, family medicine and pediatrics, Tunkel said. The rest of the class matched into other specialty fields, including surgery, psychiatry, orthopedics, anesthesiology and more, he added.
After students complete their third year of medical school, advisors are paired with students based on the medical discipline that the students would like to enter, Tunkel said. Advisors work with students to identify different residency programs and to help them complete a standardized application called the Electronic Residency Application Service, he added.
Students will then make a rank order list of their preferred programs. Likewise, residency programs will also make a rank order list of the applicants that they interviewed. These rankings go into a system that pairs a student with the highest possible residency program that also ranked the student, Tunkel said.
Finally, students find out where they will be going for their residency by opening a prepared envelope at noon on Match Day in a celebration at the medical school with their classmates, family and friends.
“This is a really big day, because where (fourth-year medical students) are going for their residency is going to define, in many ways, what they’re going to be doing for the rest of their career,” Tunkel said.
Meredith Adamo MD’18 was joined by her family and her partner when she found out that she matched to the University of California at San Francisco in internal medicine, her first choice.
“I had a lot of family waiting by the phone, waiting to see where I’d end up,” Adamo said. “I think most people would say that (Match Day) is a bigger deal than graduation because it is so unknown, and it’s a culmination of so much work to match with a residency and start your career in a field that you’ve chosen.”
Adamo will participate in a month-long rotation in an emergency department at a hospital in Bologna, Italy, before returning to Providence in May for graduation.
Naomi Adjei MD’18 matched with Yale New Haven Hospital for obstetrics and gynecology, her first choice. “I felt ecstatic, surprised, overjoyed, overwhelmed. It was just a mix of emotions that I couldn’t put words to it until later Saturday night,” she said.
Adjei added that she felt her experience at the Med School had prepared her for the match process and her residency.
“Hands down, if I were to do medical school again, then I would do Brown a thousand times over,” Adjei said. “The (advising) department has been working with us since day one to prepare us for (Match Day). I was getting phone calls and text messages all the way up to Match Day from people from the OB-GYN program here at Brown.”
In April, Adjei will be participating in a two-week “boot camp” hosted by the University of Vermont specifically for OB-GYNs.
Allan Joseph MD’18, who matched with the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center for pediatrics, will be teaching incoming third-year Med School students at the Clinical Skills Clerkship in April.
“It’s for fourth-years who are interested in medical education, so before we go out on our residencies, it’s a time for us to really work on our teaching skills,” Joseph said. “It’s a nice full-circle thing at the end of medical school.”
