Steve Gladfelter/VAS
	Lucy Lee lets her son, Matthew, open her "match" letter. Lee will stay at Stanford for her pediatrics residency.

BY TRACIE WHITE

Single mother Charay Jennings held tight to her 3-year-old daughter Lyndsey while she opened the envelope containing her future.

“I need her for luck,” she told her mom, Beverly, who she motioned close to help read the letter that would tell her where she’d be spending the next three to four years of her life as she completes her physician training. Would it be the East Coast or the West Coast?

“Omigod!” Jennings screamed. “California must like me!”

One of 90 soon-to-be-graduated Stanford medical students, Jennings, 30, and the rest of her class gathered the morning of March 20 with faculty and family for this year’s Match Day celebration to find out where they’ll be sent for their residencies—the next step in their medical training. The somewhat nervewracking annual tradition is marked by similar celebrations at medical schools across the country.

As the white envelopes are handed out one by one by faculty, screams erupt, tears fall, champagne corks pop. Years of planning, hard work and dreams somehow seem to culminate in a single moment.

“It’s so stressful,” said Jennings, an MD/PhD student, who admits she didn’t sleep much the night before Match Day. She now knows she’ll be staying at Stanford to complete her residency in pathology.

“She’s always been a fighter, always had to be the top in her class,” said her mother, beaming with pride. “I came out here from Maryland to make sure she finished.”

This year more than 15,000 medical school seniors across the nation participated in the residency assignment process. They started the long process last year when they interviewed at different residency programs across the nation. Then, in February, they submitted a ranked list of where they would like to go, while program administrators at medical schools across the country submitted their own ranked listings. The assignments are made by a nonprofit organization, the National Resident Matching Program, using a computer algorithm to align the choices of the applicants with those of the residency programs.

	Steve Gladfelter/VAS
	Lila Jazayeri is clearly happy knowing she'll do her plastic surgery residency at Stanford.

“About 90 percent of our students matched with one of their top three choices, which is a great result,” said Neil Gesundheit, MD, associate dean of advising for the School of Medicine. “It was eerily calm this year, I think because of the good results. The dominant emotion I was sensing was relief.”

There was plenty of relief mixed in with a good dose of excitement and pride.

“I knew it. I knew we’d be friends forever,” said Tom Caruso, 26, high-fiving fellow med student Chris Adams, 28. Both had just found out they matched to residency programs at Harvard. “It’s Boston!” Caruso said, grinning widely. “MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital], baby!”

“Words can’t describe it,” said another Boston-bound student, Pavan Bendapudi. “All the hard work really paid off.”

“I’m staying in the Bay Area, UCSF,” said Lorie Diaz, 27 of San Diego. “With my boyfriend, the med student standing over there, the one with tears in his eyes.”

Relief was exactly what Lucy Lee, 31, of Canada said she was feeling after read the letter that told her she’d be staying at Stanford for a residency program in pediatrics.

	Steve Gladfelter/VAS
	Matthew Bucknor celebrates after learning he'd "matched" to a diagnostic radiology residency in San Francisco.

“It’s a very high anxiety day,” Lee said, flanked on either side by her two sons Matthew, 3, and Andrew 1. Lee’s husband Jason was waiting to see if the family could stay in the Bay Area so that he could accept a pending job at Kaiser Santa Clara. He’s graduating from a residency program in pathology at Stanford this year.

Six couples in this year’s graduating class matched together, a growing trend toward medical students trying to keep some kind of balance between their work and their personal lives, said Gesundheit.

“I think more of our students are interested in specialized fields right out of medical school – things like radiology, anesthesiology," Gesundheit said. "This generation is seeking more control over their lives, more time for family. They see that specialized fields of training may be better for achieving that work/life balance.”

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Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. For more information, please visit the Office of Communication & Public Affairs site at http://mednews.stanford.edu/.