UC College of Medicine Awaits 2016 Match Day Friday, March 18
6 minute read
March 15, 2016
Craig Hansen has a mixture of excitement and nerves. He's ready to open his envelope.
The fourth-year medical student wants to be a neurologist and will soon learn where he and his colleagues in the College of Medicine Class of 2016 will spend the next three to five years training as residents.
Some will undoubtedly, stay in the Queen City, while others will crisscross the nation. At UC, they will gather in room, E-351 in the Medical Sciences Building on UC's Medical Campus Friday, March 18 at 11:30 a.m. to find out their residency destinations during the annual Match Day celebration. Students at medical schools across the nation will also learn where they matched around the same time.
Hansen, of Cincinnati, and his classmates have completed an exhaustive months-long residency interview process with the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), which links program preferences of students with those of residency program directors.
"A good neurologist can tell the patient exactly where the problem is in their brain or in their nervous system and I just think that is so amazing," says Hansen. "I am really interested in neuroscience. We know so little but have the promise of knowing so much more in my life time about how our brain works and why people act in certain ways and why our bodies behave in certain ways based on how we are thinking."
During UC's Match Day student names are called lottery style during the event. Each student hurries excitedly to the front of the lecture hall to open their residency envelopes in front of their classmates and friends and others watching at home on streaming video by visiting http://med.uc.edu/ceremonies/matchday.
Clad in class T-shirts with music in the background, the matching will be screened live in Kresge Auditorium, where many parents and family of med students gather.
UC's Academic Health Center will also post photos from Match Day via twitter using the hashtag #UCMatch2016.
This year Dean William Ball, MD, of the College of Medicine, will pull the first envelope for the class, with Aurora Bennett, MD, associate dean of student affairs, and Bruce Giffin, PhD, associate dean for medical education, pulling the rest of the envelopes for Match Day.
"This day is the culmination of all that they have worked so hard to obtain," says Bennett. "Anxiety, excitement and fear are intertwined as they wait to hear where they will begin the next phase of their medical career. It's a moment never to be forgotten, especially with the camaraderie and festivities that surround the day at the UC College of Medicine."
Hansen, 27, who received his undergraduate degree in engineering at UC, says his family will come to Match Day to cheer him on.
"I am a lifelong Bearcat," says Hansen. "I think one of the best parts of UC is its community of people. I was really lucky to come here for medical school because a lot of the faculty and staff who work here are tremendous. It will be hard saying goodbye to friends who will go to different places across the nation for residency. It will be a challenging thing to deal with in the end, but we will never forget the time we spent here."
Hansen says his time training as an engineer at UC really set the stage for a career in medicine. The problem-solving that's so intrinsic to engineering is also a key component in medicine. He witnessed that during his work with a transplant surgeon as an undergrad.
"I got to work on a project during my third year of engineering with a transplant surgeon here at UC," says Hansen. "We were designing a surgical device to assist him in doing liver transplants so we were working directly with him, and we got to go in the operating room and watch him do procedures and that process really pushed me toward medicine.
"I already appreciated the biomedical research and I knew that medicine as I began to do things, hands-on, would be more and more fulfilling. I think that working with the surgeon directly, I saw how cool it would be if I was the physician helping these patients, and also managed to get some of these engineers to make really good products to help improve these people's lives," says Hansen.
While medical students are eager to learn where they will match, program directors at the College of Medicine and UC Health also await the names of their incoming residents.
"Match Day is huge for residency programs as well," says Keith Luckett, MD, associate program director, recruiting and fellowship placement, Internal Medicine Residency at UC. "We find out who will be our new trainees for the next several years. It's the culmination of months of work interviewing potential candidates to find the best fit.
"The UC Internal Medicine Residency is the largest adult physician training program in the city— 40 new residents each match day—providing integral care for the sickest of the sick and those who otherwise might not have access to care," says Luckett. "In addition, many of these young doctors will remain in the city after training becoming the next generation of care providers for our own citizens."
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