College of Medicine

March 20, 2015

More than half of the 115 members of the Class of 2015 are pursuing primary care. Top-notch residency programs around the country — and right here in Tallahassee — are eager to train our students. And Match Day remains the most entertaining day on the College of Medicine’s calendar.

Those are a few headlines from Match Day 2015, which took place March 20 in Ruby Diamond Concert Hall. Like other fourth-year med students throughout the country, our Class of 2015 found out where the next phase of their medical training will take place.

“Once again our students matched at spectacular places, both here in Florida and across the country,” said College of Medicine Dean John P. Fogarty. “We’re very proud of our super docs, who are the next generation of patient-centered physicians to graduate from Florida State.”

Let’s dig a little deeper into the Match Day numbers:

• Fifty-seven percent of the students in the Class of 2015 chose primary care (internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics or obstetrics-gynecology).
• The No. 1 specialty for this class was internal medicine (21 percent), followed by pediatrics (14 percent), family medicine (11 percent), emergency medicine (also 11 percent) and general surgery (10 percent).
• Other students matched in anesthesiology, psychiatry, orthopedic surgery, diagnostic radiology, radiation oncology, neurological surgery, neurology, otolaryngology, pathology, plastic surgery and urology.
• Thirty-one percent of the students who matched did so in Florida, a state that ranks 44th nationally in the number of available residency slots. To help address the issue, the College of Medicine is partnering with several institutions around the state to sponsor more residency programs — including a planned new internal medicine residency program at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.
• Among the Florida programs where our students matched, the University of Florida in Gainesville was the No. 1 destination (12 students), followed by the FSU College of Medicine Internal Medicine Residency Program at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital and the University of South Florida (four apiece).
• After Florida, the states where most of these students matched were Alabama (seven), a tie between North Carolina and Texas (six apiece) and a tie involving Georgia, Louisiana, New York, Ohio and South Carolina (five apiece).
• Students heading out of state matched with superior residency programs, such as Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Baylor, Emory, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, the University of Southern California and many more.

Here’s how the nationwide match works: Through the computerized National Resident Matching Program, students electronically rank the residency programs where they interviewed, and residency program directors rank the students.

Though the College of Medicine’s Match Day ceremony lasts more than an hour, the heart of the action takes place in about three minutes of chaos, when students open their envelopes to find out where they’ll spend the next three to six years. Shouts ring out, tears flow, cameras flash, hugs abound. Later, one regional campus at a time, most of the students go onstage to reveal their residency destination. A few wait until they get onstage to open their envelopes.

The ceremony is streamed live. So Josh Greenstein told the audience that his significant other, classmate Megan Elios, was under the weather — and watching from home as he opened her envelope onstage. Caitlin Borkowski said her sister, a first-grade teacher, was watching– along with her class.

Ryan Howard seemed extra grateful for his University of Arizona match, since he had interviewed there in a T-shirt and jeans – after the airline lost his suitcase. Nicole Sparks acknowledged that she’d spent the past four long years apart from her husband, so she was thrilled that they’d be able to live together once again. Keniel Pierre (pictured above) thanked his parents for leaving their life in Haiti behind years ago, to give him a better life in the United States. His mother, who’d been a second-year medical student, never got her own Match Day. So on his big day, he asked her to read his match letter out loud onstage.

The theme this year was superheroes. Fogarty was Captain America, and the regional campus deans all dressed as heroes or villains. (For the record, no spandex.) Throughout the event, short videos (masterminded by Assistant Director of Academic and Student Services Hanna Ghirmay and videographer Karina Perez) captured behind-the-scenes moments as faculty members pretended to film an action movie. One revelation: If you put a baseball cap on him, Associate Biomedical Sciences Professor James Olcese looks remarkably like Steven Spielberg.

On May 16, the Class of 2015 will become the 11th class to graduate from the College of Medicine — which will then have 910 alumni.

Visit med.fsu.edu/matchday to watch the Match Day video.

See where our students matched.