A Perfect Match: Class of 2016

Photo: Medical students Ilana Libby and Paulina Sayegh share their Match Day results.

NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYITCOM) students celebrated their matches to residency programs throughout New York state and across the country on March 18 at an event at the Swan Club in Roslyn, N.Y.

For the third year in a row, the match and placement rate was 100 percent.

"Overall, we're extremely pleased," said NYITCOM Dean Wolfgang Gilliar, DO. "The students have stepped up to the plate and have some incredibly outstanding and very difficult-to-get matches."

Among the key NYITCOM Match Day results are:

• 132 of the 276 NYITCOM students who matched will enter primary care, with nearly half entering internal medicine, 44 matching to family medicine, and 25 to pediatrics.
• Other specialties students matched to include: emergency medicine (28), anesthesiology (19), general surgery (17), physical medicine and rehabilitation (14), traditional rotating internships (14), diagnostic radiology (11), psychiatry (8), and obstetrics/gynecology (8).
• More than 65 percent of the students will remain in New York state for their residencies, up from last year's total of 60 percent.
• Among the large university medical centers where some students will train are University of Nebraska, Brown, Yale, Vanderbilt, Vermont, Buffalo, UConn, and Robert Wood Johnson (Rutgers).
• Nearly a quarter of the students matched to institutions that are part of NYCOMEC, a consortium of dozens of affiliated hospitals and medical centers in the tri-state area.

In a packed ballroom at the Swan Club, several NYITCOM faculty members took turns reading the names of students and handing them sealed envelopes. Gilliar asked them to pause to thank those who had helped them on their medical education journey. Then, at once, the students tore open their envelopes to learn their training locations.

Paulina Sayegh and Ilana Libby beamed, eyes watering, and clutched each other and their match notices. The women met at their first-year anatomy course lab table four years ago. Starting in summer 2016, they will work as residents at Westchester Medical Center—Sayegh in pediatrics and Libby in psychiatry.

Across the room, Mathew Fakhoury reveled in his match to a urology residency at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, Chicago. "This was my top choice since four years ago," he said, later donning an NYITCOM-issued T-shirt displaying his specialty and match. "It's a blessing."

Harmandeep Singh, who matched to a residency at NewYork-Presbyterian/Queens, recalled how he became committed to internal medicine, one of the three specialties comprising primary care. "While I was growing up, my dad got diabetes," said Singh. "From six years old, I wanted to cure him."

His father still deals with some complications from the disease, but Singh reported his parents were "ecstatic" that he would remain in New York.

Nick Farris and Becky Domalski also have much to celebrate. Farris, a medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, grabbed his envelope there and drove to Long Island so he could open his envelope with Domalski, his wife. They had entered a "couples match," applying for residency together with the hope of ending up in the same program.

They did just that—Farris and Domalski will be pediatric residents at Akron Children's Hospital in Ohio.

Domalski said working in pediatrics is an opportunity to be involved in interesting and challenging cases. "I think we're just both big children," she added. "And kids are a blast to work with."

Match Day culminated students' efforts in a process that began in the fall, when they applied for and ranked residency programs of interest. On the third Friday of March, the results of the National Resident Matching Program are announced for allopathic, or M.D., residencies. Earlier this year, students who chose to go through a separate osteopathic match found out their results. In 2020, there will be a single graduate medical education system, resulting in one national accredited match for residencies.

The next milestones for the Class of 2016 are less than two months away when medical students graduate on May 22 and receive their doctoral hoods on May 23.