Having once chaired the OB-GYN department at Yale University, I watched with special pride Friday as one of our excellent USF Health Morsani College of Medicine students, Julia Wang, found out that she will do her graduate medical training there.
It was thrilling to see “Jules,” along with so many of our other Morsani College of Medicine Class of 2025 students, so happy on Match Day, the national spring rite of passage for soon-to-be graduating medical students. On Match Day, students from across the country find out where they will complete their residencies. USF’s event this year featured a Harry Potter theme of the “Magical Match.”
Our students performed exceptionally well this year, matching into prestigious programs such as Yale, Harvard, UCLA, Duke, Vanderbilt, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory, New York University, and the University of North Carolina. I’m especially pleased to see that 18 of the 177 students matching Friday are staying here with us to do their residency training at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine (Tampa General Hospital-Moffitt Cancer Center-James A. Haley VA Hospital) graduate medical education program.
But Friday’s success didn’t happen overnight.
Our students put in four years of exceptionally hard work and determination to get to Match Day. They studied so hard that Julia described the volume of information they needed to learn as “trying to drink out of a firehose.” They learned how to conduct research. And they also spent a lot of time with our amazingly dedicated faculty physicians, learning which specialties appealed to them and what skills they would need to master to be competitive for these residency programs.
“With OB-GYN, I realized that I can not only do a really great job advocating for women, especially survivors and those in vulnerable communities, but also that it combines the things that bring me joy on a daily basis,” Julia said Friday. “It will allow me to have a continuous relationship with women, so I can follow them through their teenage years all the way through labor and on through menopause. And I can also perform surgery and work with my hands.”
MCOM Class of 2025 student Julia Wang found out Friday that she matched at Yale.
Here's a look at some of these keys to Match Day success at the Morsani College of Medicine:
Academic challenge. Our students are academically competitive when they arrive, and we make sure they learn what they need to become academically successful, as a class scoring well above the national average on Step 2 of their USMLE (national board) exam.
Research experience. Almost all our medical students conduct in-depth research projects during their undergraduate years. We help them succeed with opportunities like USF Health Research Day, where earlier this year 500 students from across USF Health presented their work. We’ve started funding a research “gap year” for medical students in competitive specialties, and we’re also expanding our MD/PhD program to develop the next generation of physician scientists.
Mentoring and support. Beyond offering usual medical school mental health and wellness programs, we teach our students the basics of Stoic philosophy to help them develop their own skills of grit, resilience, open-mindedness, objectivity and deep-thinking, along with a commitment to self-directed and life-long learning. We also hold events like our annual “Gallery of Specialties,” where young medical students can hear the inside scoop on each specialty from top physicians, and then we encourage building mentoring relationships and clinical shadowing opportunities.
Students like Julia say these opportunities make a huge difference: “I would say the #1 thing that turned me on to OB-GYN was the mentors that I had at USF and TGH,” she said. “Ultimately, watching them excel in their fields made me realize that I wanted to be just like them and I wanted to soak up all the knowledge they had.”
The best part for me is hearing that our students understand the responsibility they will undertake as they become practicing physicians and embark on a lifetime on caring for patients.
“I can’t wait to learn it all,” Julia said about going on to residency. “It really is such a privilege.”
Knowing just how hard they’ve worked is what makes Match Day truly magical.
— Video by Ryan Rossy, photos by Allison Long, USF Health Communications