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Match Day sends medical students across the country
By Nate Legue
ROCKFORD — Conversations around the Wicklunds’ kitchen table may be easier to decipher this summer.
That’s when the family’s two doctor daughters will leave home (again) to start their medical residency training programs in Milwaukee and Rochester, Minn.
Sarah Wicklund, 27, and Meredith Wicklund, 25, both lived in their parents’ Belvidere home while studying medicine and will graduate this May
from the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford.
“Sometimes they would sit and talk about their days and it was like a foreign language,” said dad Dave Wicklund. “We’d have to ask them to translate.”
Today, the sisters and their 48 classmates found out where they’ll be spending the next three to seven years of their lives. Called Match Day, it’s the day that every graduating medical student in the country finds out what medical specialty and residency program they’ll join.
Besides gaining acceptance into a medical school, getting matched with a residency program will have the most profound effect on the doctors’ career trajectory. Sarah Wicklund will specialize in psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee while Meredith Wicklund will eventually head to the Mayo School of Graduate Medical Education for neurology.
Students interview at as few as five and sometimes as many as 20 hospitals, said Dr. Martin Lipsky, dean of the college. The hospitals feed their preferred choices into a centralized database and a computer program does the matching.
“The process for students takes months and months,” Lipsky said. “The computer program takes seven minutes to run.”
As the fourth-year medical students walked up to a podium to read their placements, some cried. A few, including Sarah Wicklund, carried small children on their hips. Others lifted an arm in exultation.
The emotions aren’t always because the students are getting matched to prestigious hospitals and disciplines. Sometimes it’s love.
Iroso Abu burst into tears upon learning that she’ll spend her anesthesiology residency at Boston University Medical Center and Salem (Mass.) Hospital, where her newlywed husband lives. Adentunji Onamade is the technology director for Boston’s Boys & Girls Club and the couple has spent the first year of their marriage 900 miles apart.
“It’s going to be so much different,” Abu said.
The College of Medicine has its own residency program in family medicine, which received international students from the Philippines, India, Germany, Poland and Bulgaria.
