Aditya Mahadevan’s hands trembled as he opened his Match Day envelope.
On the letter within, he saw UC San Francisco and fell to the floor with excitement as his mother quickly joined him celebrating his future.
“It’s my dream. Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to go there,” said Mahadevan, who will start his internal medicine residency at UCSF after graduating from UCI Medical School in a few months. Both his parents are doctors in the Bay Area.
Mahadevan joined 93 of his classmates on Friday, March 15, for the National Resident Matching Program’s Match Day on the UCI campus to find out where they’ll be spending the next phase of their careers.
One by one, each student approached the podium, thanked their families and announced their match. For some it was a surprise, others decided to peek in the envelope minutes before the announcement.
The matching program works like this: During medical students’ final year, they apply and interview with residency programs; the students rank the programs and the programs rank the students. On the third Friday of March each year, at noon eastern time, the matches are released.
There are more than 47,000 future doctors who take part in the National Resident Matching Program.
Dennis Juarez chose to keep his match a surprise until it was his turn. He stood with his wife, talking about his 10-year journey to complete the MD-PhD program. Holding the closed letter, Juarez quoted Creed Bratton from the popular “The Office” sitcom, “No matter where you go and no matter how you end up there, human beings have this miraculous gift of making that place home.” He laughed and added, “I don’t know who needs to hear that, but I do.”
Then, with a tremble in his voice, he ripped open the envelope and proclaimed, “I’m going to the Ohio State for their clinical investigator training program and I’ll be doing my HemOnc fellowship with them, too.”
As each student’s name was called they…
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