What is Residency Match Day for Medical Students? NRMP Process Reviewed.

UPDATE:  2013 RESIDENCY MATCH RESULTS HERE:

Today is medical student residency Match Day.  This is the March madness of the medical world.  What is Match Day for medical students?   Match Day is the day medical students find out the results of which residency program they got accepted into.  How does the Match Day process work?  Medical students spend their entire third year deciding which field of medicine they want to go into.  They get a little experience of everything, from internal medicine and  family medicine, to ob-gyn, surgery and pediatrics.  Some students already know what they want to do.  They spend extra time kissing butt and making everyone else feel much more important than they reallyare.  The popular residencies these days, like anesthesiology and radiology, aren't experienced until the fourth year of medical school.  Fourth year medical students  take these rotations early in order to kiss lots of butt to get a great letter of recommendation.

They spend large amounts of time and money in their fourth year traveling the country interviewing at programs they think they would want to go to. Residency programs do everything they can to make themselves look good.  They send the well rested residents to talk with the potential candidates and send the overworked and abused residents home during interview time.  They hide their interns.  They take you to fancy restaurants  and bars and liquor you up.  They lie about their average daily census.  They insult other programs.  It's cut throat competition for these medical students and residency programs.  I know because I have experienced the process.

All that time and energy comes down to one day:  Match Day.   After they have completed their interview process, usually January at the latest, medical students pay their application fee to turn in their list of residency programs in their order of preference.  The residency programs also turn in their list of applicants in the order they want them and some magic computer algorithm decides which medical students go to which program. Then everyone waits until Match Day.  For my medical school, everyone got together for a Thursday lunch with champagne glasses in hand.  They called our names.  We walked up to the podium and they announced where we were going.

Everyone claps.  Some students hide their disappointment for not matching at their first choice.  Some students don't even show up because they failed to match (which they found out several days prior).  That's never a pleasant experience.  That's called the Match Day scramble.  For those students that didn't match at all before the big day, they are given a list of residency programs that didn't fill their slots.  Then it's grunt work. Students need to call programs and beg them for a residency slot and hope they get accepted.

Most medical students in my class matched with one of their top three choices.  Some had to scramble.  I chose my medical school's residency program because it had a phenomenal ABIM 100% board certification pass rate for more than a decade.  Some folks like to leave their training program to get a different flavor of medicine at a different institution.  Some like to move for the weather.  Some like to move for family reasons.  Whatever the reason, medical students  just hope they match on Match Day.  When it's all over, it makes no difference what you do for the next three months.  You are pretty much guaranteed a degree in medical school after match day.  Just don't do something stupid.

Here's a look at the time line of events leading up to the current Match Day results for 2013.  Also, visit the National Residency Match Program (NRMP). website.    In addition, the NRMP website has links to all their historical match results dating back almost 30 years.