On March 18, students, family, friends and other well wishers filled the Radisson Hotel's Grand Ballroom. As Associate Dean and Director of Student Affairs Wallace K. Tomlinson took the stage, students quickly finished passing the hat, each tossing in $10 toward the bounty which would be paid to the patient student whose name was called last in the randomly announced matches.
It was good news for Tulane students; 85 percent matched to one of their top three choices, surpassing the national average of 80.5 percent, reported by the National Resident Matching Program. At Tulane, 70 percent received their first choice, 4 percent got their second choice, and 11 percent matched to their third. Nationally, approximately 57 percent matched to their first choice, 15 percent to their second, and 8 percent to their third.
Tulane students will be scattered among 29 states for their residency training, with the highest number (39 students) remaining in Louisiana.
California and Texas were next with 18 and 13 students respectively.
Students will be training at a number of prestigious institutions, including: Vanderbilt, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, UC San Francisco, Northwestern, Duke, Harvard and Tulane, where 36 students will receive at least part of their training. In terms of specialties, more than half of the students - at Tulane and nationally - chose a generalist discipline, including internal medicine, pediatrics, preventive and family medicine.
On the flip side, Tulane had 99 residency positions available, all of which were filled.
Changes to the matching process this year included allowing applicants who did not initially match 48, rather than 24, hours to obtain a residency position prior to Match Day. Also, this year, students could opt to learn their fates in the privacy of their own homes, via the World Wide Web, where match results were posted for the first time. According to the number of students and friends who stayed late into the afternoon at the annual post-match party sponsored by the Tulane Medical Alumni Association, few if any students chose this new alternative.