Match Madness!

Each year, on the third Friday of March, thousands of graduating medical students across the country are placed into residency programs through the National Resident Matching Program, referred to as the MATCH. For the Fertitta Family College of Medicine, this year’s Match Day marked a major milestone not just for the students, but for the college itself.

“This is our inaugural class, so these students are the first to experience this rite of passage, the transition from medical school to the front lines of medicine,” said Dr. Kristin Kassaw, assistant dean of student affairs. “As they open those envelopes, they also open the door to their future as health care providers who are ready to make a meaningful difference in society.”

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the MATCH was created in 1952 to bring order to the residency placement process. Previously, competition between residency programs became so fierce that some began scouting and offering promising students early in their training so they could only consider one program at a time. So the MATCH, a centralized clearinghouse, was created to control the chaos.

This year, all 22 students in the Fertitta Family College of Medicine’s first class matched with a residency program, including Houston native Jalyce Taylor who matched with the pediatrics program at the U.S. Navy Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, the country’s first naval hospital.

“This match is a dream come true as it means I can build upon my family’s legacy of being educators and health care providers and serving in the military,” Taylor said. “I have been gifted with amazing support over these four years and it will be my privilege to provide care to our Navy sailors and their families.”

When the Fertitta Family College of Medicine welcomed its first class in 2020, it became the first new medical school to open in Houston in nearly 50 years. Now as students in that first class meet their matches, it is an opportunity to look back on how far they’ve come in four years.

“As we celebrate Match Day, it has been my profound honor to watch these students evolve and flourish the past four years,” Kassaw said. “They came into a new medical school with no history, just a promise of preparing them to be compassionate primary caregivers, and now they are the future of health care.”

UH President Renu Khator first unveiled plans for a new College of Medicine in 2014, envisioning a program that would produce a diverse group of graduates with a deep understanding of the non-medical drivers of health and a commitment to providing comprehensive, high-value health care to underserved populations in Houston, across Texas and beyond.

Brittanie Cockrell, a fourth-year student from Port Arthur, Texas, says that vision, and the opportunity to blaze a new trail in health care education, drew her to UH.

“I came to UH because of its unique mission to improve health care and health outcomes in underserved communities,” said Cockrell, who matched with the pediatrics program at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “Just 5.7% of physicians in the U.S. are Black, so I carry the privilege and responsibility of joining them in serving our most vulnerable populations with pride.”

Match Day isn’t the last opportunity these students will get to celebrate while in medical school – their degrees will be conferred at commencement in May – but it does give them their first real chance to reflect on their journeys.

“Match Day is a celebration, but it’s also a great time to reflect on these past four years,” Cockrell said. “I was intimidated when I first came here, but my confidence and abilities have grown tremendously, and I’m leaving here a much stronger person than when I started.”

Sarah Snyder, from San Jose, Costa Rica, will do her residency with the emergency medicine program at Ascension St. John Hospital in Detroit.

“Being a part of the inaugural class was hard work, academically and emotionally,” Snyder said. “I am very proud of how far we have come as a class and as an institution, and I truly believe some of the most important trailblazers in health care will attend medical school here.”

Anthony Carona, from Dickinson, Texas, matched with the anesthesiology program at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in Temple, Texas.

“As a husband and father of two small children, Match Day means so much as I find out where me and my family will spend the next four years,” Carona said. “It has been great being part of the inaugural class at the Fertitta Family College of Medicine, and I am grateful to the faculty and my friends who supported me and encouraged me these past four years. There’s only ever going to be one first class and I think we left the school better than we found it.”