Personal Stories from the Recent Match Day Ceremony
For Hiral Shah, Match Day means a chance to work with his wife and the realization of a second career. For Carolyn Goh, it means the possibility of learning more about a skin disease with which she is afflicted and using that knowledge to help others like her. And for Rafael Vazquez, it is one more step in a journey from a small town in Mexico to helping Spanish-speaking New Yorkers as they face a daunting health-care system.
Match Day is a national stress-inducing event, when over 15,000 medical students from across the country learn where they will spend their years of residency training. According to the National Resident Matching Program, the Match uses a computer algorithm to align the preferences of applicants with the preferences of residency programs in order to fill available training positions, a euphemism for a highly competitive — and largely secretive — process where applications to top institutions far outnumber the available positions. Once again this year, Weill Cornell students performed exceptionally well, with 65 percent obtaining positions at the most prestigious U.S. teaching institutions and 24 percent matching in the very competitive subspecialties of neurology, neurological surgery, otorhinolaryngology, ophthalmology, emergency medicine, radiology and dermatology.
But for many students, their match is more than placement at an elite hospital.
During his first career as a corporate lawyer, Hiral Shah reviewed five to six hundred pages of contracts a day. "I got disenchanted," Shah said. "I was getting paid well, but I was miserable."
After volunteering in an emergency department to get a feel for medicine, Shah quit the firm ("They were shocked but supportive...") and dedicated himself full time to studying medicine. He matched to North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, Long Island, where he will train alongside his wife, an attending radiologist at the hospital. His placement will also allow Shah to help raise his 7-month-old daughter. "Changing my career is the best thing I've ever done," he said.
With three doctors in her family, Carolyn Goh was hesitant to pursue medicine. "I always thought, I'll explore my options in college and sort of make a choice after taking other classes," said Goh, who sidelined a traditional pre-med track for an undergraduate degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity.
One of the factors that ultimately helped change her mind was alopecia areata, a relatively common skin disease of unclear pathology that left Goh almost completely bald after the age of three.
"At first I didn't want to go into dermatology, but then it changed," Goh said. "The disease provides the drive and the interest." Goh, who plans on a career in pediatric dermatology, applied to over 40 programs and was ultimately matched for dermatology at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell.
At the Match Day ceremony held in Griffis Faculty Club, Rafael Vazquez, the modest but outgoing president of this year's class, mused over the journey he has taken from Puebla, Mexico, to his anesthesiology residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. "It sounds like a cliché, but I really believe that I am the American dream."
Before the ceremony had concluded, Vazquez was on to his next challenge: finding a way to pay off medical school loans. But he was quick to add that grants from Weill Cornell were a big reason he was here.
"Cornell's been really good to me," he added. "I definitely plan on giving back to them later on."
- by Gabriel Miller, Office of Public Affairs