Class of 2024 Match List Analysis
Internal Medicine - 25
Pediatrics - 8
Internal Medicine/Pediatrics (combined residency) - 2
Internal Medicine/Preventive Medicine (combined residency) - 1
Obstetrics & Gynecology - 10
Family Medicine - 12
Psychiatry - 11
General Surgery - 5
Otolaryngology - 1
Plastic Surgery - 1
Thoracic Surgery - 1
Urology - 1
Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMFS) - 2
Preliminary Surgery - 1
Emergency Medicine - 6
Radiology - 5
Radiology/Nuclear Medicine - 1
Interventional Radiology - 1
Ophthalmology - 4
Anesthesiology - 7
Dermatology - 2
Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation - 1
Pathology - 4
Neurology - 1
As high school students are comparing medical schools at different Bachelor/MD programs (if you’re lucky enough to be in the position of having several Bachelor/MD acceptances in the first place, and it’s also perfectly fine if you do not), one factor that you will look at, although not the only factor, will be residency match lists:
If you’re someone who has not gone through medical school and/or do not know any physicians personally, it can be very difficult as someone outside of medicine to be able to properly interpret and also reach proper conclusions from a medical school’s match lists. For most graduating high school seniors who enter a Bachelor/MD program, this would be very difficult to do on your own without supplemental help.
Part of interpreting a medical school’s residency match list involves:
- knowing which programs are the good residency training programs in each specialty, with the top-tier residency programs in each individual specialty being the most competitive
- seeing geographically where most medical school graduates from a particular medical school end up matching, especially in competitive geographical areas (i.e. state of California, New York City, Boston, etc.)
- looking at several years’ worth of residency match lists in order to see a medical school’s “track record” of being able to send their graduates to specific specialties/regions/program institutions and to match in competitive specialties
Top-tier residency programs in a specialty don’t necessarily automatically mean that they are Ivy League institutions, although it can sometimes be the case. Individual residency training programs, even in non-competitive specialties, can also be competitive for other reasons: easier lifestyle during residency training, geography (i.e. being located in sunny California or in a bustling city like New York City), etc.
It’s more helpful to notice match trends overall rather than to hyperfocus on any one particular student’s match or on any one particular match year when evaluating a medical school. For example, noticing one hard-hitting stellar match and then extrapolating it to the entire medical school student body or the caliber of the medical school itself is probably not a wise idea, as you don’t necessarily know the entire story behind that stellar match, i.e. the person did a research year(s) at the NIH, the person did an audition elective rotation and really impressed clinical faculty, or they may have a personal/internal connection there, etc.
Context is always helpful in terms of evaluating any particular person’s residency match.
For example:
- Did that student have to take a year off from the BA/MD program to get some research publications under his/her belt to bolster his/her residency application?
- Is that student part of the military match?
- Did that student couples match with someone else in the same medical school class?
- Did that student want to follow a spouse from a previous year’s class and do residency in the same area?
- Was that person geographically restricted in some way (i.e. wanting to be closer to family, having a significant other not in medicine who has to find a job in the area where the student matches)?
- Did that student do an audition rotation (or research) at the place where they matched and knocked their socks off?
- Were they an MD-only student, who may have done quite a bit of research or had ancillary degrees?
- Was that person unable to match from a previous match cycle year and had to apply again?
All of these factors can play into a medical student’s final match outcome which is the result of a computerized mathematical algorithm that incorporates an applicant’s rank order list, a residency training program’s rank order list of applicants that it has interviewed, and the computer gives out the best possible outcome taking into account both lists. Keep in mind if someone currently in the class applied but didn’t match into any training position, even for the first year of internship, you will not see their name on a residency match list.
Things that you won’t be able to see by looking at a medical school’s match list for a particular year:
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where that residency program was ranked on that student’s rank list (so you won’t know whether it was his/her first choice or their last choice).
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whether the specialty the student ended up matching into was that student’s #1 preferred specialty or whether the student may have matched into a backup residency specialty, whether that’s:
Different BA/MD classes at UMKC can have different personalities. For example, in one year, a lot of students in the class may want to go for more primary care oriented type of specialties, or in another year, they may have a lot more students going for more surgically oriented type of specialties, which may not be the case in other years.
Medical students also take other things into account (besides just the residency training program alone) when it comes to coming up with their final rank list and matching into a residency program: geographical considerations, wanting to live closer to immediate family during residency training, spousal considerations, standard of living of the city and how far a resident’s salary in that area will go there - since you’ll be making a relatively lower salary during residency training.
There are also online published rankings of hospitals/residency programs in each specialty which you can see here:
One thing that I wanted to make clear as I have before, is that my analysis of this year’s match list is not meant to be a personal judgment of the UMKC BA/MD students themselves. It’s not meant as a personal attack or personal criticism. In fact, I would say especially in recent years, the caliber of the type of student that enters the UMKC BA/MD program is very stellar. My goal is to try to point out trends, both compared with the medical school’s prior match lists, as well as to other medical schools. It is also to help those applicants who may already be considering a particular specialty or particular geographic area and need to see a med school’s prior track record of getting their students to match into that particular specialty or in particular geographic areas. If you’re someone who is not at all sure what specialty you want to go into (and you don’t have to know at this point at all by any means) and thus don’t want to feel restricted in any way, looking at a medical school’s residency match lists to see the distribution of matches, in terms of specialties and programs, is important.
All that being said, I kind of think of residency match lists as sort of turning on the tv about a minute before the closing end credits come on, and trying to figure out the plot from the tv show that happened 29 minutes before. With a match list, you are only seeing the final product, but you don’t see the years before that went into creating that final product – studying for basic science courses, taking USMLE Step 1 in Year 4, Year 5 required clerkship performance, audition rotations in Year 6, taking USMLE Step 2 CK, research and any publications that came from it, how and when the person ended up deciding which specialty to shoot for (and the factors that went into that decision), how much geography came into play, whether people couples matched, what backup specialties were seriously considered, etc.
The question isn’t about the people who are AOA or at the top of the medical school class. Those people will almost always do relatively well (there have been exceptions) in the residency match compared to their peers, both in terms of the specialties that are potentially available to them, as well as the actual programs and institutions that they match into, although even then that’s not necessarily a golden ticket, especially coming from UMKC. The question is about those who are in the top half of the class or in the middle of the class. Are competitive specialties still available to them like they can be at other medical schools? The best example I can come up with is when it comes to comparing a UMKC med student with a medical student at Mizzou (in Columbia, MO) or a medical student at WashU in St. Louis, MO. If you compare match lists between those institutions you can see how drastically different they are.
So Internal Medicine is our strongest specialty at UMKC, both in terms of the number of students who match into that particular residency in any given class, as well as when it comes to our students’ overall total exposure to Internal Medicine in the BA/MD curriculum. This is generally through our Continuing Care Clinics in Years 3-6 in which students spend half a day each week in an outpatient/ambulatory Internal Medicine clinic and our 2 month inpatient Internal Medicine rotations (commonly referred to as Docent Rotation or “DoRo”) done each year in Years 4-6. The programs that our students were able to match into were mainly at lower-tier & middle-tier (with a select few stronger middle-tier programs at places like Emory, UC-San Diego, Case Western, UT-Southwestern) IM programs, excluding the 2 top-tier matches at Mayo and WashU (both of which are Midwest programs like UMKC and matched into by AOA students). In the past, we have had 1-2 students in a particular year match into places like Mayo and Wash U for IM (again in the Midwest) which in recent years tends to usually be AOA candidates. No top-tier Internal Medicine programs on the coasts like Hopkins Osler, Mass General, UCSF, Brigham and Women’s, Duke, Penn, etc.
I think this confuses applicants to the UMKC BA/MD program & their parents, since the amount of Internal Medicine that we do at UMKC is so much more when compared to other medical schools, so you’d think that our students would be matching more into very strong middle-tier or top-tier IM institutions, especially since we get so much additional IM exposure and maybe even greater confidence in interacting with patients that students at other medical schools don’t get. Keep in mind that in comparison to traditional medical school graduates, at UMKC we do 4 more months of inpatient Internal Medicine than everyone else. Most other medical schools do an Internal Medicine inpatient rotation for 2 months once during the MS-3 year. Also while we do outpatient/ambulatory IM clinics one half-day per week for 4 years, traditional medical school graduates do maybe one month of an internal medicine or some type of primary care ambulatory clinic.
Of course, it’s much more complicated than that, in terms of the match, but clearly just having more student curricular exposure is not the only factor being taken into consideration in selection for the top-tier IM residency programs, nor is that exposure enough on its own to justify taking someone, as that is what residency training is for, in which the learning curve is very steep and thus people at other schools can catch up quickly. Most people going for IM tend to go with the intention of becoming subspecialists thru fellowship - Cardiology, GI, Heme/Onc, Allergy, etc. although people also can become hospitalists or do outpatient IM as well.
Family Medicine is another area of medicine that UMKC BA/MD students get plenty of exposure to through Year 1 & 2 Docent, the Family Medicine clerkship in Year 4, and the Family Medicine Rural Preceptorship in Year 5. We had 12 students match in that specialty, mainly in programs in the Midwest as many of our students are from Missouri or in the regional category around Missouri.
For Pediatrics, nearly everyone matched into Children’s Mercy Hospital besides one candidate who matched at a top-tier program and that was the AOA candidate. Most likely this year a LOT of UMKC students wanted to stay close to home, and Children’s Mercy Hospital itself is a really great children’s hospital (as a general rule, most pediatric hospitals in America are actually quite nice). In Peds, the rate of subspecialization after residency is different than in Internal Medicine, as the income factor discrepancy isn’t as pronounced in the Peds world from generalist to specialist, as it can sometimes be in the IM world.
In Obstetrics & Gynecology, we had 10 people match, all in middle-tier and lower-tier programs. The one student who matched into a higher tier program was a person who had done a 2 year public policy fellowship at Harvard. In Psychiatry, we had 11 people match, mainly in lower middle tier and lower-tier programs. The one student who matched into a higher tier program was an MD only student.
As is pretty typical for our medical student match lists at UMKC, in total, very few of our students go for General Surgery or surgical subspecialties (Neurological Surgery, Orthopaedic Surgery, Otolaryngology, Plastic Surgery, Thoracic Surgery, Urology, Vascular Surgery). The only surgical residencies that we have at UMKC are General Surgery and Orthopaedic Surgery. So for all of the others, you will be very much dependent on outside institutions (meaning outside of UMKC) that have residencies in those specialties for help to be able to match into those specialties. Although this year is lower than average at 10 total (I’m not counting the Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery spots as these are students who are already a part of the OMFS program at UMKC, so the match is more of a formality for them), as our school’s overall clinical emphasis is much more on Internal Medicine and the primary care specialties.
All the General Surgery matches were in middle-tier and lower-tier programs. There were no Orthopaedic Surgery matches this year, which is different/unusual compared to prior years. The students who matched into thoracic surgery and urology were both BA/MD students who took a year off to do a research fellowship year program. The Plastic Surgery match was an MD-only student and the Otolaryngology match was an AOA candidate who matched at the residency program close by.
In terms of the more ancillary specialties: Radiology, Ophthalmology, Anesthesiology, Dermatology, Emergency Medicine, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Pathology, etc., with two of these specialties being very competitive (one of which we do have a home residency training program in Ophthalmology), you can see that we tend to have a much lower total number of people entering these fields, for a variety of reasons. Those in the 2 very competitive specialties in this category coming from UMKC tend to be those who were more academically competitive and more often in AOA, although not always.
Radiology is moderately competitive (compared to at its peak when it used to actually be on par in competitiveness with Derm). So accordingly, our match lists have opened up to more people being able to match into Diagnostic Radiology coming from UMKC. That being said, even our AOA candidates matched into middle tier (although relatively solid middle tier) programs. One top tier match was someone who had done an NIH research fellowship. The increased competitiveness has shifted away from Diagnostic Radiology and more towards Interventional Radiology, which now has its own separate residency track also (it used to be only a fellowship after completing Diagnostic Radiology residency). The Interventional Radiology match was by the AOA candidate.
For Ophthalmology, non-AOA candidates matched into lower-tier programs, with one having done a research year in the same state where he/she matched. The top tier program was matched into by the AOA candidate, although keep in mind that Ophthalmology, by itself, is a competitive specialty to match into to begin with.
In the specialty of Anesthesiology, 7 students matched, mainly into lower tier programs. The ones who matched into top tier programs were AOA candidates and/or those who did a research fellowship. For Dermatology, both were AOA candidates matching into middle tier Derm programs in the Midwest, even with one student having taken a research year off. For Emergency Medicine, we had 6 people match, mainly into middle tier and lower tier programs with an MD only student matching into a top tier program.
Overall for this year’s match list, taking into account the overall breadth & variety of specialties matched into, residency program institutional caliber (even for the non-competitive specialties), geographical distribution, I would say this year’s match list overall is below average/weaker compared to previous years’ match lists for UMKC.
Keep in mind that UMKC SOM has always been a smaller, lower-tier medical school so the spectrum of specialties / programs that a student is able to match into coming from UMKC (even with taking a year off for research) will be different than medical schools that are in the middle-tier and top-tier. A UMKC BA/MD student that is at the top of his/her class will have to work much harder, be more innovative and creative in building up their CV than students at other medical schools where resources and opportunities are abundantly and readily available to them. That can be somewhat exhausting and frustrating as a student, especially if you’re already paying the regional or out-of-state rate.
Several things to note:
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The residency match has gotten a lot tighter for U.S. medical graduates in recent years due to the ratio of the number of residency spots available to the number of U.S. medical school graduates, with many new allopathic medical schools being added by the LCME in recent years, and thus more graduating U.S. med school seniors that weren’t there in previous match years. To give you a better idea of this, according to statistics, in the year 2000, we had 124 allopathic medical schools. We now have more than 150 allopathic medical schools. And this doesn’t even include osteopathic (D.O.) medical schools which also take part in the merged residency match system (it used to be that the allopathic and osteopathic matches were separate, although the timing was the same). This merger was completed in 2020.
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Medical school reputation, both in terms of academic prestige, and also being “known” entities, in terms of the quality of their medical school graduates, based on personal experience from residency program directors, will probably be a lot more important now than it used to be. Thus, the lower-tier medical schools will be the first to feel the crunch, while top-tier med schools will be hit less hard or the last to feel the crunch, if even at all.
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This year, 124 UMKC med students entered the match, with 113 students having matched into at least a first year residency position (this is commonly known as an internship). One possibility (although not as likely) is that some students didn’t want their residency match to be posted, but another possibility is that 11 students didn’t match at all, although we don’t know the individual specific reasons behind that.
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Unlike what it has been in prior years, more and more UMKC students going for certain specific specialties feel they may have to (or at the very least, feel comfortable with) take a year off from medical school to do a research year, in order to bolster their application, with sometimes even our AOA candidates feeling the need to do so. It’s not an assurance to a stellar residency match, but it can help.
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With this year being the very first UMKC School of Medicine match class to have taken USMLE Step 1 as a Pass/Fail exam in Year 4 (2022), I would say that this change likely ended up hurting our students this year, as it was then that much harder (compared to previous years) for our medical students to be able to set themselves apart early on, half-way through medical school, without having to do something extra on top of the curriculum, like taking a year off from medical school for research.
You can compare these match lists for UMKC to those at Mizzou, SLU, and Wash U, as well as Google medical schools’ match lists from your own home state, as most med schools have posted them online. If you have any questions at all on the match list or the actual matching process, please feel free to ask.