May I have the envelope, please?

3, 2, 1 match! On Friday, March 17, 170 fourth-year medical students at the University of Michigan and across the nation participated in a countdown to discover where they will continue their professional medical journey. At noon, they tore into the envelopes revealing where they’ll begin residency training this summer.

Match Day is a decades-old, national tradition. Graduating medical students around the country enter the matching process by ranking the locations where they’d most like to train for their chosen specialty.  The residency programs rank the students they’d most like to take. Then, an elaborate computer-based system puts it all together to make the best matches

Lean more about the process here

The excitement of Match Day 2017 was palpable at U-M’s North Campus Research Complex, with students laughing and smiling, taking selfies with one another and posing for photos with friends, family, and faculty in front of maize and blue balloons.

Students circulated around the room, congratulating one another and asking classmates where they would be heading to continue their training. Many students were called on stage one-by-one to announce to the crowd where they matched. Others indicated their destinations by pinning push-pins to an oversized United States map.

The event came in the same week the U-M Medical School was ranked 9thamong U.S. research-oriented medical schools and 5th for primary care schools by U.S. News and World Report.

According to the U.S. News results, U-M continues to rank among the very top in the estimation of residency program directors – senior doctors at teaching hospitals nationwide who interview and select graduating medical students to enter their programs.

Highlights of this year’s match:

• 45 percent of U-M’s graduates will enter a field that can lead to a career in primary care.
• About 30 percent will remain in Michigan for residency, working in hospitals in Ann Arbor, the metro Detroit area, Lansing and Grand Rapids. Many heading out of state are going to California, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas.
• 37 students this year will graduate with both a medical degree from U-M and an advanced degree in another field from a top-ranked graduate program at U-M or elsewhere, such as the Medical School’s biomedical Ph.D. program, public health, clinical research, business or public policy, or will be completing a residency program in Maxillofacial Surgery.
• 22 percent of this year’s class matched to residency slots at Michigan Medicine.  Nearly 1,200 doctors-in-training in 105 residency and fellowship programs currently train at U-M’s hospitals and clinics. Those programs are highly regarded by doctors around the country, and by the doctors who completed them, according to results compiled by Doximity.
• Nearly 99 percent of this year’s U-M students entering the national match process matched to a residency spot in this intensely competitive environment, far above the national average.

Now on the road to residency, the U-M Medical School Class of 2017 takes another step toward the future with graduation on Friday, May 12 at Hill Auditorium. Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., former University of Michigan Medical School faculty member and current director of the National Institutes of Health, is this year’s commencement speaker.