WASHINGTON, DC – In a completely unexpected development in the past 24 hours, medical schools and residency programs are shocked and confused as a grand total of zero medical students matched into residency programs nationwide, leaving 100% of open spots vacant. This is the most unsuccessful Match Day in medicine history.
“I ranked forty programs just to be safe and I didn’t even get my fortieth choice,” said a tremendously disappointed fourth-year medical student Carrie Waters, widely considered to be this year’s top general surgery prospect. She remains befuddled. “We’re all stunned. I don’t know a single person who matched. IN ANYTHING. How can this be?!”
“NOT EVEN ONE??!!” cried one school of medicine dean, who wished to remain anonymous due to pure embarrassment. “In the whole country, NOT EVEN ONE??!!” Medical school deans from coast to coast have echoed the same tormenting sentiments.
Entering into this application season, medical schools boasted about their strong crop of eager, motivated, smart, and talented medical students with bright futures in numerous specialties and subspecialties across medicine and surgery, while residency programs were just as excited to recruit them with their hundreds if not thousands of spots to fill. No one is really sure what happened, but it appears that everyone was just really, really incompatible.
“This is bad, really bad,” said Dr. Jason McClellan, internal medicine program director at Boston Health Sciences. Normally, his program recruits thirty to forty candidates to make up each year’s intern class. This year, his class features zero new faces. “I’ve never laid a goose egg on Match Day. The boss isn’t going to like this. Oh boy.”
Medical students are completely lost and scrambling. Residency programs are stressed, charged with the task of staffing their schedules without a year’s worth of interns. However, two groups of people are quite okay with this year’s Match Day results: patients and nurses.
“As a patient, I don’t have to worry about that new intern who doesn’t know what he or she is doing,” said nurse Colette Roberts, smiling from ear to ear. “And as a nurse? Well, I don’t have to put up with that new intern who doesn’t know what he or she is doing. It’s a beautiful thing.”
