Match Day 2020 will be held on Friday, March 20, when graduating medical students across the country tear open their National Resident Matching Program envelopes to discover where they will serve their residencies. In anticipation of the big event, two recent School of Medicine graduates from UMass Medical School reflected on their Match Day experiences, in a new Voices of UMassMed podcast.
“They’ve come a long way, and it’s a real exciting feeling to know where you’re going,” said Courtney Temple, MD, SOM ’17, a resident in emergency medicine at UMass Memorial Medical Center.
Steven Krueger, MD, SOM ’18, said Match Day is a moment filled with mixed emotions.
“You can feel the electricity kind of pulse through the crowd when everybody opens their envelopes at the same time,” said Dr. Krueger, a resident in dermatology at UMass Memorial Medical Center. “I remember being all excited about ranking them, and then here I am thinking, ‘If I open up this envelope and I end up in the Midwest, what is my whole family going to do?’”
Opening the envelope only takes seconds, but the matching process is a huge undertaking, he said.
“The decision on where to rank certain programs is an individual, personal decision for each applicant. I would say for the most part, maybe for a slight majority of applicants, location and geography is playing a big role in where your ranking places,” he said.
Both offered advice on the match selection process and insight into managing expectations.
“I want everyone to just remember to take a moment during the entire process to reflect and be excited about how far they’ve come, and really try to own that feeling of how much they’ve accomplished no matter what is in the envelope,” Dr. Temple said.
To listen to the new Voices of UMassMed podcast, visit: umassmed.edu/news/voices.
To be notified when a new episode of the podcast is available, subscribe on SoundCloud or iTunes.
