As far as I can tell: the original Urology match on January 24th left several prominent schools with unfilled positions. The odds are strongly against places like Hopkins and Baylor having unfilled spots, when so many excellent applicants rank them highly.
A re-match occurred on the 27th. I don’t know if this kind of error has ever happened before.
Wow. Spend 4 years in medical school, put your money and blind faith in the system, and watch it fail.
The good news is that they’ve re-run the urology match; the bad news is that it’s caused not just a little anxiety among the applicants. Read the whole post to see.
via Cut to Cure
Surprising, but then again, maybe not. Urology programs are usually small, one or two residents per year. They might only interview ten or fifteen times that number, and select a list for the match smaller than that. When all of the programs are fighting for a small number of the most competetive applicants and not listing broadly in the pool, some programs, even very good ones, won’t fill. It is the program’s fault for being greedy and not truthfully assessing their relative competetiveness.
The residency programs are responsible for this outcome, not the match process or the medical students.
Uhhh. No.
It’s not the programs’ fault. The Match computer process got glitched up. That’s why they fixed the problem and ran it again.
The programs have been doing the match for decades. They are not stupid people, these folks from Johns Hopkins and Cleveland Clinic and what not, and know exactly how many students they need to list in order to get a full quota, within a resonable probability.
The fact that such top programs did not match a SINGLE student virtually certainly disproves your theory that they didnt rank enough people. If they did that, I can understand missing one spot.
But CC has FOUR spots, ALL of which went unmatched. It’s simply not believable for that sort of thing to happen to the top program in the country unless they was a technical screw up.
Uh, yes . . . .
My theory still holds. Very well, in fact. And, in fact, it is not disproven simply because one program did not fill any of its slots. It is very possible for many of the best candidates to be short listed at many programs. And it is possible that many of the CC’s preferred candidated themselves preferred to go someplace else, JHU, Lahey, Mass Gen, UCLA, UWash
or wherever.
This is simply a fact of match systems. They don’t guarantee a fill, for programs or students. Programs have to pick safeties too. If they don’t, they might not fill.