For many medical students, Match Day is among the most exciting days of their lives. The excitement often culminates in a medical school’s Match Day ceremony, during which students open envelopes containing their residency destination simultaneously and, often times, announce their results to a large crowd.
The merriment of a Match Day ceremony is plenty of fun but mixing it with an air of uncertainty doesn’t create a comfortable environment for everyone. As students ponder how to spend their Match Day, here are some tips from a wellness-focused faculty member and two current residents.
Many ways to celebrate
Chantal Young, PhD, is director of medical student wellness at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. In her role working in student wellness, she has seen students receive and process their Match news in a number of settings.
In the past she has offered medical students the chance to open their Match envelope in her office, if they prefer a more private setting in which they could be supported. How you spend that moment is highly individualized, she said.
“There's a lot of pressure on that moment,” Young said during an episode of “Meet Your Match” series of the “AMA Making the Rounds” podcast.
She added that the perception can be that ”it has to be an idealized moment like, oh wow, I'm so joyful. But we like to say there are many ways to do that.”
Processing news privately
A fourth-year medical student at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in the spring of 2022, Haidn Foster, MD, felt that a public venue wasn’t the place for him to get the news about where he was going to spend the next several years of his life.
“I didn't want to feel self-conscious given the weight of others’ expectations during that time,” said Dr. Foster, now a second-year internal medicine resident at Penn State Health who plans to subspecialize in hematology-oncology. “I took my private Match celebration as a personal experience to process whatever emotions that could come up during that moment. For my own mental health, that was the right decision.”
After fully processing the news, Dr. Foster spread word of his results to friends and loved ones.
“One of the benefits of that approach is that I could decide how I let other people into my Match day experience,” he said.
Power in peer support
Match Day came at the end of an unexpectedly wild week for Victoria Gordon, DO. Now an emergency medicine PGY-2 at HCA Houston Healthcare, in Kingwood, Texas, Dr. Gordon found out on Monday of Match week that she didn’t’ match.
That news caused Dr. Gordon—a medical student at Kansas City University College of Osteopathic Medicine at the time—to scramble during a whirlwind week in which she applied to 40-plus programs and conducted dozens of interviews as part of the Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP) process. She accepted her current position on Thursday, and on Match Day she gathered with a smaller group of friends to join them as they received their Match news.
“When it came to me, we all pretended [to be surprised] when I was like ‘emergency medicine in Houston.’ ... It was a little dark humor,” she said during a recent episode of “Meet Your Match.”
After Dr. Gordon and her peers got the news—and she wasn’t the only one who had a result that left them somewhat disappointed—they went to their medical school to join a larger group of medical students to celebrate.
“We all just kind of hung out, which was nice because at the end of the day we were all moving soon. Besides graduation, it was one last hurrah together. It definitely wasn’t the Match Day I envisioned, but it wasn’t the worst day of my life either. It was really nice to be around friends for me.”
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