Match Day 2022 Filled with Anticipation, Joy, Relief

Match Day 2022 Filled with Anticipation, Joy, Relief

This year’s School of Medicine Match Day, where graduating medical students find out where they’ll be doing their residencies, was held March 18 in the GSU Metcalf Ballroom. Nirisha Commodore (MED’22) (left) and Korede Yoloye (MED’22) celebrating their matches: Commodore is headed to Emory for internal medicine and Yoloye to Brown for pediatrics.

Match Day 2022 Filled with Anticipation, Joy, Relief

Emotional day as fourth year medical students learn where they’ll be serving their residencies

This past Friday was an emotional day for Nirisha Commodore. She had left her family in the the Caribbean Island of Dominica, where she grew up, to attend the School of Medicine, drawn by its focus on advocacy and serving communities. Now, on Match Day—the annual event where graduating medical students learn where they’ll be serving their residencies, Commodore (MED’22) was overjoyed that her family could join her as she opened the long white envelope to find she had been “matched” to an internal medicine residency program at Emory University in Atlanta.

“I’m so happy! It makes it even more exciting for them to share the moment with me,” Commodore said.

Match Day is a tradition dating back 70 years: fourth-year medical students nationwide gather at their respective medical schools at noon on the third Friday of March to open the envelopes that contain their “match”—the residency program where they will continue their training for the next three or more years.

“I know for many years to come you’ll be thought of as the class who went through their clerkships and clinical rotations during the COVID pandemic, but for me your class is something much more than that,” Priya Garg, MED associate dean for medical education, told the students and their loved ones and friends gathered for the celebration in the George Sherman Union Metcalf Ballroom. She noted the Class of 2022’s focus on social justice, gender, and health equity and their initiatives to help create a more inclusive classroom and ideas for curriculum changes.

“Your voices are with me when I think about the future of medical education at BUSM,” Garg said. “I know you will be change agents in the future no matter where you go and what it says in that envelope.”

For many of the assembled students, the warm springlike day did little to soothe pre-Match nerves. At the stroke of noon, they crowded around the two long tables where the envelopes were arranged. After opening them, they clustered in groups with their families, friends, and faculty. There was laughter, happy tears, and relief that the past year of anxious anticipation was behind them.

After two years of virtual celebrations, fourth-year medical students gathered in person to celebrate with family, friends and faculty. Video courtesy of BUSM

“It was very nerve-wracking overall,” said Nicolette Jabbour (CAS’15, MED’17,’22), who hails from Coral Springs, Fla.. She had just found she’d been matched with her first choice, an otolaryngology, head and neck surgery residency at Boston Medical Center. Jabbour has been at Boston University from her undergraduate years through medical school, picking up a master’s degree in between. Unlike former Patriots QB Tom Brady, she loves Boston winters.

“I will probably stay here long term, settle down here,” she said, noting that the pandemic had helped her really appreciate her time with friends and family and a slightly slower pace.

“That was one of the things that was upsetting about the pandemic. All I wanted was an in-person Match Day,” said Jabbour, whose mother had traveled from Florida to be with her for the celebration.

Kapua Meyer (MED’22) was one of four Hawaiian fourth years, and each wore flower wreaths on their heads. Each grew up on the island of Oahu, and they met at BU. Meyer is headed to UCLA for a residency in family medicine and says she is looking forward to snow-free winters again.

“I learned to be flexible, that was the main thing,” she said, which helped her get through medical school during a pandemic.

Alana Skovhus (MED’22) (from left), Kapua Meyer (MED’22), Meshelle Hirashima (MED’22), and Aaron Ponce (MED’22), all from the Hawaiian island of Oahu, on Match Day.

Karen Antman, dean of MED and provost of the Medical Campus, congratulated the Class of 2022 on reaching Match Day “in person! With your families and significant others.

“Although your cohort of medical graduates globally had a pretty conventional medical education for the first two years, COVID really upended your clinical education” the final two years, Antman said, noting a similarity to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1970s that produced outstanding physicians like Anthony Fauci (Hon.’18), director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to President Biden, and Paul Farmer, the recently deceased cofounder and chief strategist of Partners In Health. Antman expressed confidence that the pandemic would do likewise with their generation.

“Your class has done very well in the Match,” Antman noted. This year saw 37 percent matched in primary care specialties, compared to 30 percent last year, and the class will disperse to residency programs in 30 states, from Maine to Hawaii.

Following graduation in May, 40 MED students will be staying in Massachusetts, 14 at Boston Medical Center, one at the combined BMC-Boston Children’s Hospital pediatric residency, and one at BUSM affiliate St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton.

California (25), Illinois (15), and New York (14) were the next most popular states. The class matched in a range of programs, with the top specialties being internal medicine (32), emergency medicine (15), family medicine and pediatrics (14 each), surgery (10), and anesthesiology (9).

“In nine weeks, you will be graduating,” Antman told the assembled students. “After that, when you hear the announcement: ‘Is there a doctor in the house or on the plane?’ they will mean you.”