On Friday, March 18, NYU Long Island School of Medicine held its first Match Day, a ceremony that takes place at medical schools across the nation during which it is revealed where graduating students will fulfill their medical residencies. Perhaps few graduating classes have been through as much during their medical education—training to become doctors in the middle of a pandemic—and perhaps few Match Days are as anticipated as that of NYU Long Island School of Medicine.
In 2019, when NYU Long Island School of Medicine first opened awarding Full-Tuition Scholarships to all students, it became the first independent medical school in the nation to offer an accelerated three-year MD program devoted exclusively to training primary care physicians. Today, with the Class of 2022 discovering their "doctor destinies" on Match Day, the vast majority of the school's students will enter primary care disciplines at a time when the nation will be short of primary care physicians by upwards of 21,000 within a decade.
Matching Program
Each year, residency matches are made through a mutual selection process run by the National Resident Matching Program, with students and residency programs ranking their preferences. A computer generates matches among more than 38,000 residency positions nationwide, with the algorithm so complex that its developers were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. At 12:00PM ET, along with students at medical schools nationwide, students at NYU Long Island School of Medicine opened their envelopes to reveal their residency matches. Residency training positions start soon after the school's inaugural graduation in May.
While NYU Long Island School of Medicine's graduating students could be matched with any residency position nationwide, the school is pleased to announce that 40 percent of students matched with NYU Langone locations, and another 10 percent matched with additional institutions in the broader New York region. Ninety percent of NYU Long Island School of Medicine students have selected residencies among the following primary care disciplines: family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology, with training in prestigious institutions across the country.
Following their residency training, it is anticipated that many will return to serve the New York and Long Island communities in which they have been trained.
In addition to the years of demanding curricula and rigorous clinical rotations, the inaugural Class of 2022 contributed to critical COVID-19-related research and volunteered for countless hours during the pandemic in support of patients, staff, and their communities.
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