Match List analysis - Part 1 of 3
Ok, so I wanted to wait until after Friday, so that any changes to the match list could be made if necessary after match day, to give my analysis similar to what was done by several people last year. I’ll try to follow the same format. As students will be comparing medical schools at different BS/MD programs, match lists will be one big factor that will be looked at. If you’re someone who has not gone thru medical school, does not know any physicians or those in medicine, it can be very difficult, to properly interpret and make conclusions from match lists when making medical school matriculation decisions. Part of it involves knowing what are the good residency programs in each specialty, with the top-tier programs in each particular specialty always being the most competitive. Top-tier doesn’t necessarily automatically mean name prestige, although it can sometimes be true. Particular residency programs can also be more competitive for other reasons: curriculum structure affording easier residency lifestyle, geography (i.e. being in sunny California), etc.
It’s more helpful to notice trends, especially across years, rather than to hyperfocus on any particular person’s match. For example, noticing 1 Stanford match and then extrapolating it to the entire student body is probably not a wise idea. Context is always helpful in terms of any particular match. For example, did that person take a year off from the BA/MD program to get some research publications under his/her belt? Is that person part of the military match? Did that person couples match? Did that person want to follow a spouse in another class who graduated ahead of them and thus do residency in the same area? Was that person geographically restricted in some way (i.e. significant other not in medicine who has to find a job in the area the person matching will be doing residency, wanting to be close to family, etc.)? Did that person do an audition rotation and knock their socks off? Were they an MD-only student, who may have done quite a bit of research or had ancillary degrees? Different BA/MD classes have different personalities. For example, one year a lot of people may want to go for more primary care oriented type specialties, which may not be the case in other years.
Applicants also take other things into account when it comes to coming up with a rank list and matching with programs: geographical considerations, wanting to live close to family, spousal considerations, the standard of living of the city - since you’ll be making a relatively low resident’s salary, during residency training. There are also rankings of residency hospitals/programs which you can see from USWNR: http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals and Doximity: https://residency.doximity.com/, which varies by specialty. If you look at the map on the 2016 Match List, you’ll see a lot of our matches tend to be more clustered in the Midwest, which is pretty consistent with prior years, just based on applicant preference (and where they come from) and UMKC being a more known entity in that area.
Things you won’t be able to see in a medical school’s match list: whether for each match, the specialty the person matched into was that person’s #1 preferred specialty or whether they ended up matching into a backup residency specialty: whether not applying at all in the fall for their #1 preferred specialty and applying for another specialty that they’d like or at least be ok with and are more competitive for, simultaneously applying for 2 specialties during the fall, or thru the SOAP process (formerly called “The Scramble” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Resident_Matching_Program#Failure_to_match). Also, if someone currently in the class who applied didn’t match into any position, and thus doesn’t have current postgraduate plans in July, you will not see that name on the list.
One thing I wanted to make clear is that my analysis of this year’s match list is not meant to be a personal judgement of the students themselves. It’s not meant as a personal attack or criticism. My goal is to try to point out trends compared with prior Match lists, considering @UMKCRoosMD was kind enough to post lists from 2003 to present. It is also to help those who may be considering a particular specialty and need to see a school’s prior track record in getting students into that specialty, which will be relevant in their decision making now. If you’re someone who is not at all sure what specialty you want and thus don’t want to feel restricted in any way (and you don’t have to know at this point at all by any means), looking at match lists to see the distribution a particular school is able to get in terms of specialties and programs is important. I kind of think of the match lists as sort of turning on the tv about a minute before the end credits come on, and trying to figure out the plot from the tv show that happened 29 minutes before. You guys are seeing the final product, but you don’t see the years before that went into initially creating that product – studying for basic science courses, taking Step 1, clerkship performance, audition rotations, taking Step 2 CK, research and any publications that came from it, how the person decided which specialty to shoot for and when they decided, how much geography came into play, whether people couples matched, what backups were seriously considered, etc. which also has an effect on the end match, although you can still note common trends from year to year.
So in our strongest specialty at UMKC, both in terms of the number of people who matched into that field, as well as to our student’s overall exposure in the curriculum, Internal Medicine (IM), the best programs that our students were able to match into were at middle-tier institutions. So even our top performing students who were going for IM, matched into middle-tier IM programs, although some being strong middle-tier institutions, no top-tier places like Hopkins Osler, UCSF, Mass General, Brigham and Women’s, Duke, Penn, etc. although in the past we have had 1-2 students in a particular year match into places like Mayo and Wash U for IM – notice both in the Midwest. Keep in mind, in comparison to traditional graduates, we do 4 more months of inpatient Internal Medicine than everyone else, not including our weekly half-day IM clinics for 4 years, at which other schools, at most, do one month of ambulatory clinic. I think this confuses people, since the amount of Internal Medicine education we get at UMKC is much more when compared to other medical schools, so you’d think that we’d be matching more people into top-tier IM institutions easily in this field, since we get the added exposure and maybe greater confidence that students at other schools don’t get heading into IM. Of course, it’s much more complicated than this, which I won’t go into here, but clearly just having more student curricular exposure is not the only factor in selection for the top-tier IM residency programs, or it’s not enough on its own to justify taking someone, as that’s what residency training is for, in which the learning curve is very steep and thus people catch up quickly. Most people going for IM tend to go with the intention of becoming subspecialists thru fellowship - Cardiology, GI, Heme/Onc, Allergy, etc. although people also can become hospitalists as well.