Graduating Emory University of Medicine medical students gathered at noon today for the greatly anticipated Match Day 2017 ceremony.
The Emory students are among thousands nationwide who applied for residency positions at U.S. teaching hospitals through the National Residency Match Program (NRMP) that annually matches students with residency programs.
"The Match Day ceremony is a long-awaited culmination of hard work and perseverance that always proves to be one of the most thrilling times in the lives of our medical students," says J. William Eley, MD, MPH, executive associate dean for medical education and student affairs, Emory University School of Medicine.
"Today our students learned they are headed to some of the top programs both here at Emory and throughout the nation to begin their careers as physicians."
Emory's Class of 2017 included 131 students participating in the NRMP. Forty-four students will spend all or part of their residencies in the State of Georgia and 40 of those students will remain at Emory for their residency training.
In addition to Emory, the students will receive their residency training at prominent institutions such as Duke, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, University of Massachusetts, NYU and University of Washington.
Some of the most popular specialties chosen by Emory's graduating seniors in the 2017 NRMP match include: Internal Medicine (34), Pediatrics (16), General Surgery (13), Emergency Medicine (10) and Family Medicine (8).
Prior to today's NRMP match, three Emory graduating seniors had matched into the military residency match, one student had matched in Urology, and four students had matched in Ophthalmology.
The Match was established in 1952, at the request of medical students, to provide a fair and impartial transition to the graduate medical education experience. A complex algorithm, administered by the NRMP, factors in the preferences of the students with the preferences of residency programs in order to fill the available training positions at U.S. teaching hospitals.