‘Listen to the nurses and listen to your patients’: Dean’s advice to graduating UofR medical students on “match day”

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – “Three, two, one!” At exactly noon, 104 graduating medical students at the University of Rochester opened an envelope to see where they matched for their residency. Each one hoped for their first pick.

“I’m going to UCLA for internal medicine,” said Arman Niknafs. “Unreal. I am so grateful to be trained at the University of Rochester.”

Other students shared their exciting news:

Karyssa Harris: “I’m going to UC San Francisco.”

Divya Naidu: “I’m going to Baltimore at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins.”

Diamond Guy: “I’m going to the University of Rochester. It’s truly a blessing and an honor. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was 6 and I’m finally doing it.”

News10NBC Chief Investigative Reporter Berkeley Brean asked Dr. David Lambert, Dean of Medical Students, what their future in medicine will be like.

Dr. David Lambert: “They will face a lot of challenges with economics, with artificial intelligence and a lot of other things. But the fundamental part is taking care of the person. And these students have been trained that the individual is important.”

38 of the graduating medical school students matched at a hospital in New York State, with 26 of them staying at the University of Rochester. The last thing the dean of the medical school told the future doctors before they opened their envelopes was, “Listen to the nurses and listen to your patients.”

There are about 100 students in a med school class at the University of Rochester, but they get 5,000 applications every year. With uncertainty around funding for medical research, some wonder if more students will shift from Ph.D. programs to medical school, making it even harder to get in.

Berkeley Brean: “If there is a shift of people going from research to medicine the applications will go up but there is not a plan for any school that I know of to increase the number of students in a class.”

Dr. David Lambert: “I think actually one of the areas where I feel less uncertainty is in the medical student program. We have a solid program, it’s well supported, and it does not appear at this time to be on the radar screen of people looking to institute changes across the country.”

In the last 10 years, the number of med students in America is up 14,000. However, the Association of American Medical Colleges says the number of applications went down every year for the last three years. Enrollment at the University of Rochester is just over 400.

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