College of Medicine

March 21, 2014

Six of our fourth-year students matched with our internal medicine residency program at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. One student matched with our brand-new family medicine residency program in Fort Myers. Four out of 10 students are staying in Florida for their residency. More than half of our students are going into primary care. And James Bond is alive and well and masquerading as a medical school dean.

Those are the headlines from the FSU College of Medicine’s Match Day 2014, which took place Friday in Ruby Diamond Concert Hall. Like other fourth-year med students throughout the country, our Class of 2014 found out where the next phase of their medical training will take place.

Beforehand, through the computerized National Resident Matching Program, students electronically rank the residency programs where they interviewed, and residency program directors rank the students. On Match Day, the envelopes are opened, the students learn who matched with which programs, and most of them walk onstage to announce the news.

Dean John Fogarty was pleased with the results.

“We’ve placed a great deal of emphasis on trying to create more graduate medical education opportunities in Florida, and I think we’re starting to see the effects already,” he said. “We kept six more of our graduates in Florida with our new internal medicine program at TMH, and overall the number of grads leaving the state is lower than it has been in the past several years. That’s a trend we’d like to see continue.”

Let’s dig beneath those headlines a bit more:

• Florida has an abundance of medical students but a shortage of residency slots. The silver lining, though, is that students heading out of state matched with superior residency programs, such as Duke, Georgetown, Yale, Wake Forest and many others.
• Among those Florida programs where our students matched, Orlando Health was the No. 1 destination (11 students), followed by a tie between the FSU College of Medicine Internal Medicine Residency Program at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital and the University of South Florida (6 apiece), and the University of Florida Gainesville (5).
• In all, nine students matched with residency programs sponsored by the College of Medicine. Two students matched with the OB-GYN program at Sacred Heart Health System in Pensacola, in addition to the six in internal medicine at TMH and the one in family medicine at Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Myers.
• After Florida, the states where most of these students matched were North Carolina (9) and a four-way tie involving Alabama, Georgia, New York and Texas (6 apiece).
• More than half of the students chose primary care (that is, internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics or obstetrics-gynecology).
• The No. 1 specialty was internal medicine (21 percent), followed by family medicine (15 percent) and emergency medicine (11 percent).
• Of our record 12 students in the military, nine had actual military matches; the three others matched with civilian programs.
• Keerti Dantuluri, Joseph Hernandez and Judy Lin matched and soon will become the first in the Honors Medical Scholars program to graduate from medical school.

The theme for Match Day this year was 007. Throughout the event, short videos (masterminded by Assistant Director of Academic and Student Services Hanna Ghirmay and videographer Karina Perez) featured faculty members in various spy-spoof situations. Onstage, Dean Fogarty was dressed in a James Bond tux, while the deans of the regional campuses portrayed assorted Bond villains.

Although the students have the option to open their match envelopes when they’re seated with family and friends, many waited until they got onstage. Quite a few had spouses, sweethearts, parents, children, even cousins onstage for moral support. Lexie Mannix’s cousin traveled all the way from Michigan.

Here’s a sampling of memorable moments:

• Many students said they had matched with the program they ranked first, but Rick Sims got the most “ahhhs” from the audience when he walked up to the microphone with a young woman and announced, “I already matched my first choice. Her name’s Janelle.”
• The audience also loved Guimy Alexis, because his young son was dressed exactly like him but also because he let his wife open his envelope. “We all go through this journey with other people,” he told the crowd.
• Angela Guzman’s niece got perhaps the biggest laugh. Guzman opened her envelope, looked surprised, picked up her niece, whispered in her ear, and smiled as the little girl proclaimed, “We’re going to Disney World!” (Translation: Guzman matched with Orlando Health.)

The Class of 2014 has 115 students. On May 17, they’ll become the 10th class to graduate from the College of Medicine, which will then have 795 alumni.

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

See where our students matched.