Students cheer for one another as the Match Day choices are announced.

Video: Students Learn Their Next Move

By ADAM EMERSON
The Tampa Tribune

TAMPA — Like the rest of her USF medical school classmates, Beth Blazick accepted the envelope that would determine her professional future with pangs of anxiety.

Its unknown contents contained the location of where she would spend the next three to seven years of her life. The control she exercised over her studies for the past four years dissolved in the second it took to rip it open.

Thursday was Match Day, when prospective physicians and surgeons nationwide discover where they conduct their residency training. University of South Florida medical students traditionally gather at Skipper’s Smokehouse, where the heightened anxiety is tempered by draft beer and chicken wings.

More than half of the 116 graduates learned their fates by the time Blazick reached the microphone. Her hands trembled when she unfolded the letter announcing her destination: Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the nation’s most esteemed, where she will serve as a surgical resident.

She cried into the microphone and ran to her cheering classmates. When the tears dried, she double-checked the letter to make sure she read it correctly.

“This is really the trophy at the end of it all,” Blazick, 30, said afterward.

About 15,000 U.S. medical school seniors performed the same exercise at noon Thursday, a record number of seniors applying for residencies nationwide, according the nonprofit National Resident Matching Program.

Thirty of USF’s 116 graduates will remain at the college to conduct their residency. Not everyone received the first choice they hoped would jumpstart their careers. But many shed tears as Blazick had.

“I started out at a community college,” said Archer Martin, 24. “Now, I’m going to Yale,” where he will conduct his anesthesiology residency.

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