Top story: Graduating students are ‘awed and grateful’ at UMass Medical School on Match Day

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It’s hard to pick a favorite story from among all the great news we covered this year. So we’re letting our readers pick. Below is one of the most-read stories from 2019. It originally ran on March 15.

Match Day 2019 was a dream come true for graduating UMass Medical School students Marian Younge and Anthony Tran. They are among the 125 members of the School of Medicine Class of 2019 who found out where they will begin their medical careers in residencies across the country.

Match Day is the annual, nationwide pairing of graduating medical students with postgraduate residency training programs. The National Resident Matching Program makes the matches through a complex algorithm that factors in the preferences of both the students and the residency programs to which they have applied. Per UMMS tradition, the class opened their envelopes simultaneously in a room packed with family, friends, faculty and fellow students.

Younge got a family medicine residency at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, Cal., where she will be providing prenatal, obstetric and primary medical care to patients from a medically underserved community, just as she hoped for.

“I’m awed and grateful to be at this point after all these years of hard work,” said Younge, who attended North High School in Worcester after her family immigrated from Ghana when she was a teenager. There she participated in the Worcester Pipeline Collaborative health careers program, first coming to the UMMS campus with the High School Health Careers Program.

She returned while an undergraduate at Tufts University for the Summer Enrichment Program for college students interested in medicine. These opportunities, made possible by the UMMS Office of Outreach Services, helped prepare her for medical school. She has given back as a volunteer for the Pipeline, founding the Young Men of Today, Medical Professionals of Tomorrow program for black male students at North High.

“UMass Medical School plays a huge role in investing in exposing people like me to health care,” Younge said. “It was great to have a good support system, which helped me persevere through the challenging moments we all experience during medical school.”

Tran is part of the first cohort of students who participated in the UMass Bacc/MD program, which creates a pathway from the University of Massachusetts system’s undergraduate campuses to the School of Medicine in Worcester.

“Being the first in my family to graduate from high school and college made it a little more difficult to navigate towards a career in medicine,” said Tran, who grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston with his Vietnamese parents. “The mentorship I’ve had at UMass, from undergraduate to medical school, has been supportive of every decision I’ve made.”

Tran will begin his residency in medicine at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge then continue in neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

“A lot of patients in our community lack understanding of neurodegenerative diseases and consider them just a natural course of growing old,” he said. “With my multicultural upbringing coupled with my training at UMMS, I feel I have the ability to overcome that gap.”

Representing the institution’s mission to train primary care physicians, 61 students matched in internal medicine, family medicine and pediatrics and obstetrics-gynecology, representing 49 percent of the class. Twenty students matched in family medicine and 19 in emergency medicine. Fulfilling the medical school’s mission to care for the citizens of the commonwealth, 49 members of the class are staying in Massachusetts, including 23 at UMMS and five at academic partner UMMS/Baystate Medical Center in Springfield.

Watch the full event here or check out the slideshow below.

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