Primary Care type Specialties
Internal Medicine: 31
Pediatrics: 15
Internal Medicine-Pediatrics: 4
Family Medicine: 6
“ROAD” or other lifestyle oriented specialties
Radiology: 6
Ophthalmalogy: 2
Anesthesiology: 5
Dermatology: 1
Emergency Medicine: 7
Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation: 4
Pathology: 1
Psychiatry: 3
Surgical Specialties:
General Surgery: 3
Preliminary Surgery: 3
Orthopedic Surgery: 7
Otolaryngology: 2
Oral Surgery: 1 (this isn’t a field available to med students, but to those who have completed a DDS degree)
Neurological Surgery: 1
Plastic Surgery: 1
Urology: 1
Don’t know where to fit these (lol)
Obstetrics/Gynecology: 4
Neurology: 1
Transitional Year: 1
So to anyone who was interested (or not), here is my interpretation of this year’s match list. I copied and pasted the 3 columns of the 2015 match list to Excel and had it filter and count up the number of people in each specialty. You can see this tabulation above.
Right off the bat I noticed that there are 110 people who matched (compared to last year 84), which has to be the biggest class I’ve seen match. Almost always the class match/graduation sizes are in the high 80s. They seem to be taking on more students at the last half of Year 2 with MD-only students (which finally now they have opened up to also those who aren’t from Missouri) to make up and go beyond attrition, since they are taking the same number of students at the Year 1 level even in my time. No question that it brings in a lot more tuition money to UMKC when you replace a Missouri student who left with a regional/out-of-state student. I also think part of the reason that match lists are improving is that much more of the class is outside Missouri than it used to be, even though UMKC is a public med school.
When I was in school it was either in-state/out-of-state at a ratio of 90:10. Now there is a regional category (which is still expensive for a regional compared to their state school IMHO), so the ratio of in-state:regional:out-of-state is (10-15):(30-35):(60-65). Students who pay much more in tuition will naturally want to go in specialties that pay off their student loans quicker - at least with the way the reimbursement scheme is now, fee-for-service, which will have disappeared by the time you practice, but since no one knows the results of that new system, you just make the best decision in the circumstances you have.
As always, not surprisingly, about half the class went for primary care fields. Traditional Primary Care is considered to be Internal Medicine + Pediatrics + Family Medicine + Medicine-Pediatrics = 31 + 15 + 6 + 4 = 56. I guarantee nearly most of the people in IM and Peds will not be primary care physicians. They will enter subspecialty fellowships and thus become specialists.
Not surprisingly, the people who were AOA (Alpha Omega Alpha) got into better institutions – this will be the case at any medical school. You can see the people who were nominated to AOA from UMKC either on the UMKC website or on the Alpha Omega Alpha website. I also think AOA helped a lot when it came to specialties that UMKC doesn’t offer, see the 2 people who got into Otolaryngology (ENT) - although even those weren’t “top” places in that field - one in the Midwest and one in Mississippi.That being the case, there were people who matched into great institutions even without AOA – see the Plastics match, the Anesthesia match at Beth Israel with Harvard, Ortho at Harvard, etc. Those people were likely (but I’m not sure of course) top of their class (just didn’t get AOA), but also may have done other things - publishing, rotating there, etc. We’ll never know just from looking at the list.
I notice that a lot more people got Radiology, Orthopedics, PM&R spots (UMKC does not have a PM&R program, but there is a child PM&R doctor at Children’s Mercy who probably mentors students and he went to KU’s PM&R residency program). It could be a fluke, bc last year only 2 people got into Radiology and 1 person into PM&R but those may have been the only ones interested that year. What’s good is that at least you have the potential to match in those fields coming from UMKC. I think those better numbers are 100% related to the improved Ortho and Rads departments - who have new, better, nicer faculty, are actively mentoring students on their applications, are taking a greater role in their student Interest groups, etc. Much different than in my time when UMKC Ortho and UMKC Rads hardly even took UMKC students, and the match lists reflect that.
Ophtho and Derm have always had small numbers – The Ophtho Dept isn’t a huge mentor for students (they also hardly took UMKC students to their own residency) although 2012 was an exception, http://med.umkc.edu/ophthalmology/current-residents/. Derm has never been great since UMKC does not have a Derm residency.