'This is my dream come true,' says Pitt med student, a Fox Chapel native, on Match Day

Medical student Rachel Kann said she couldn’t be happier to find out she’ll be staying in Pittsburgh.

“This is my dream come true. … I’m just so grateful to have gotten the chance to stay in this amazing city for seven more years and practice here,” Kann said.

A Fox Chapel native, Kann was among those who opened envelopes at Friday’s Match Day event at the University of Pittsburgh’s Petersen Events Center. She was matched with UPMC Presbyterian.

Kann’s next seven years will be spent working with the hospital’s general surgery program.

“I’m staying here! I’m ecstatic,” she said.

The confetti, balloons, cheering and celebration at noon Friday marked the beginning of a new chapter for Kann and 148 other medical students at the Pitt School of Medicine.

During the annual Match Day festivities, medical students across the country find out where they’ll be spending the next several years of their lives in residency programs. Students open their envelopes at the same time in an event meant to celebrate their next steps.

Chenits Pettigrew Jr., associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at the Pitt School of Medicine, described the event as a culmination of the students’ hard work.

“This is really what tells them that they have finally gotten where they are trying to go,” he said.

“It’s probably as important a day as graduation,” said Alda Maria Gonzaga, associate dean for student affairs. “This is just really exciting. This is the beginning of a transition for them from student to physician.”

Emotions run high

Match Day is an emotional time for medical students, said student Lena Vodovotz of the North Hills.

“It’s definitely been stressful,” she said. “It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of your fate being sealed inside that envelope, so to speak.”

Even with the stress, she said, she has been able to catch up with friends from inside and outside the program and try to unwind.

Exams already have wrapped up for this year’s medical class, she said, but some rotations continue. The cohort will graduate at the end of May and start their residencies over the summer.

“It’s a long, grueling road with a lot of twists and turns, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything,” she said of the program so far.

Nick Aloi of Brighton, another medical student, said his interest in medicine started when he injured his meniscus and ACL while playing basketball for high school powerhouse Lincoln Park. He matched into orthopedic surgery and will be doing his residency at UPMC Hamot in Erie.

“Sports injuries in particular is what I took an interest in — broken bones, broken ligaments, torn tendons,” he said. “I think that that motivated me to go into medicine — to treat the kids that I used to be.”

The process leading up to Match Day started in the summer of last year, he said, when students applied to different programs. They then received interview invites and could rank numerically the programs they interviewed with by preference. The programs in turn rank all of their applicants, and the match process assigns the students to programs based on both rankings.

“It’s one of these points in life that’s a transition point,” Aloi said. “Each stage along the residency process, you get little wins here and there. … There’s a lot of culmination and stuff leading up to today that I think makes it such an exciting day.”

Leadup to celebration

The Match Day celebration is organized by the medical students themselves, said Savannah Tollefson, class council president.

“I think that one thing that was important to all of us was highlighting our class as a whole,” said Tollefson, who is originally from Richmond, Va. She will be doing her residency at UPMC in the OB-GYN program.

This year’s graduating class of the medical school started its program in fall 2020, meaning many of the students’ first-year classes were virtual, she noted.

“We went through a pandemic together, and I just feel like we’ve been through the thick of it together, and we really wanted to celebrate that.”

Match Day used to be a more formal affair, Gonzaga said. Students would go up one by one to find out where they would spend their residency. About six or seven years ago, she said, students started creating more of a party atmosphere to commemorate the occasion.

“This is much more of a, ‘We’re here to celebrate with each other,’ ” she said. “While a big deal, the students have really driven it to be more of celebrating in the same moment at the same time, with lots of balloons and fun music.”

To amp up the festivities, the cohort put together a collaborative playlist for the event, which included 2020 viral hits such as the “Wellerman” sea shanty. Students also continued a Match Day T-shirt tradition, in which each student customizes a T-shirt with the names of their program and assigned location once they find out where they’re going.

“We tried to incorporate everyone as much as possible in the process, beyond just the class council,” Tollefson said. “Even though it’s a stressful day, this is really a culmination of everything we’ve worked toward.”