More on the Match

This year the match day is set for Thursday March 18, 2010. All 4th year medical students get a letter 1 week prior to the match day that tells them if they did match or did not match. You hope that you get a notice stating that you matched. Then you have to wait a week to find out which of the programs on your rank list that you matched at and where you will be going. Following a week of torture all the 4th year medical students meet up at their schools on "Match Day" and everyone receives their envelopes and wait for the official signal and then tear into their letter to see where they and their family will be going. This occurs on Match Day at all of the medical schools across the country on the same day and at about the same time.

For most it will be a day of happiness and celebration but for some it will be a day of frustration and or panic as they find out they matched at a program that hey really did not want to go to or they do not match at all and have to enter the "scramble".

The residency programs get their list of new residents for the upcoming year (their program's match list) on the same day and they learn who they get at their program. This can be a happy or sad day for the residency programs as well. They may have a spot or 2 not filled or they may have drawn from the end of their match list and not matched the rockstar students they had hoped to get.

In the more competitive fields there are very few (if any) spots that go unmatched and there will be several applicants that do not match at all. These students will have to either scramble into a different (less competitive field) or take a 1 year general internship and reapply the following year. In the less competitive fields there will be several programs that do not fill all their spots and will have to try and fill the spots in the scramble or leave the spot unfilled.

Emergency medicine is more toward the competitive side on the scale of competitiveness but not as competitive as the super competitive specialties. Last year there were only 5 or 6 unfilled spots that were immediately filled before the scramble even really began. There were many applicants in emergency medicine that failed to match and had to change their specialty of choice or make a new plan. This year looks like it may even be more competitive as most of the emergency medicine program directors I have spoken with have said that they have seen at least a 10% increase in applications from last year. Some of the programs will get 800+ applications for 10 spots.

It should be interesting.