PHILADELPHIA – On Friday, March 16, 151 medical students from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania will celebrate Match Day. During the annual, nationwide ceremony, students find out, one by one, where they are headed for their residency training for the next three or more years of their medical careers.
The event is the culmination of a process that began in the fall through the National Residency Matching Program, which helps pair graduating medical students across the country with the hospital or medical center of their choice.
“Opening these little envelopes is kind of like opening the doors into our careers as physicians,” said graduating MD/MBA candidate and 2016 Pat Tillman Scholarship recipient Jonathan Wood. “It's great to celebrate with classmates. We each decided to enter careers in medicine for different reasons and now after four years of learning and growing together, I am excited for all us to continue on our unique paths to careers in medicine.”
This year’s Match Day event will take place in the Henry A. Jordan M’62 Medical Education Center. Completed in 2015, the 55,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art education center has been a part of PSOM students’ medical education for more than three years. Its co-location with the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine and the Smilow Center for Translational Research gives students the unique opportunity to closely interact with faculty researchers and clinicians as they follow an integrated and multidisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes small-group instruction and self-directed learning.
This year, Wood and graduating MD/MBA candidate Pratyusha Yalamanchi have been sharing their thoughts and perspectives in Penn Medicine’s annual Match Day blog series. Family, friends, and news media can also follow the excitement by using the #PSOMMatch hashtag and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) #Match2018 and #iMatched on social media.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.1 billion enterprise powered by more than 49,000 talented faculty and staff.