Medical Students Meet Their Match

TTUHSC Medical Students Open Envelopes that Reveal Residencies

• By Kay Williams
• March 21, 2025
• Education

March represents springtime, new beginnings and time for Match Day for fourth-year medical students nationwide. The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center’s (TTUHSC) School of Medicine students participated in Match Day Friday (March 21).

For these 168 students set to graduate in May, new beginnings started with anticipation and excitement as they opened their sealed envelopes simultaneously with students across the country. Once opened, the envelopes’ content revealed where they will spend the next three to seven years as residents and what specialty they will pursue for their professional careers.

Match Day is a nerve-wracking event that has played out on medical school campuses across the country since 1952. Months before Match Day, students begin applying to residency programs in their preferred specialties. Students visit sites to evaluate and ultimately rank their preferred residency programs. At the same time, administrators at each site interview and rank applicants. The process is blinded, so neither applicants nor programs can see each other's rank order lists.  

Many students apply for more than one specialty and do not know until Match Day which medical specialty they matched with. Although the majority of U.S. medical school seniors match to one of their top three program choices, applicants may match to programs lower on their rank order list, especially when their preferred specialty for training is among the most competitive.

Last year, nearly 45,000 applicants competed for more than 38,000 first-year residency training positions across the country, according to the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP).

The NRMP coordinates this process and makes the final match algorithm, which is designed to produce results for students to fill the thousands of training positions available at U.S. teaching hospitals. 

This year, TTUHSC School of Medicine students matched to institutions including Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, University of Pennsylvania, Case Western, Cedars-Sinai, Wake Forest, UT Southwestern Medical Center, UT at Austin Dell Medical School and UT Health San Antonio.

Of the 168 TTUHSC students, 17% matched at one of the TTUHSC affiliated residency programs; 65% are remaining in Texas and 45% of the students matched to a primary care affiliated residency program. Other student matches included 20 in family medicine, nine in OB/GYN, 27 in internal medicine, 12 in general surgery, 18 in pediatrics and 16 students in psychiatry.