Newswise — March 20, 2015—(BRONX, NY)—As graduating medical students around the country learn their professional fates, members of the class of 2015 at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University celebrated another successful Match Day. An annual rite of passage, Match Day is an event that takes place at medical schools across the country during which fourth-year medical students learn where and in what specialty they will complete their residency—setting the course of their medical careers.

“Match Day is the culmination of medical students’ hard work over the past four years,” said Stephen Baum, M.D., senior associate dean for students at Einstein. “Our students do very well in the Match each year, so it’s a fun, joyous day, knowing that all their hard work has paid off.”

Ninety-six of the 191 M.D. and M.D-Ph.D. students who matched will be entering the three specialties that comprise primary care medicine: 56 matched to internal medicine residencies, 30 to pediatrics and 10 to family medicine. In addition to these three, which ranked #1, #2 and #5, the top 10 specialties for Einstein students were: emergency medicine (19), obstetrics & gynecology (13), psychiatry (9), surgery (9), diagnostic radiology (7), anesthesiology (7) and dermatology (6).

Of note for this class was the uptick in the proportion matching to family medicine (5.2 percent, up from 2.8 percent last year), emergency medicine (9.9 percent, up from 6.8 percent last year), and dermatology (3.1 percent, up from 2.2 percent last year).

This year, the Match offered 30,212 first- and second-year positions. More than half of the new first-year positions were in the primary care specialties of internal medicine, family medicine and pediatrics. There were 41,334 registered applicants vying for the positions, the largest number on record.

Match Day is conducted annually by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). It uses a computerized mathematical algorithm to align the preferences of applicants with the preferences of residency programs in order to fill the residency training positions available at U.S. hospitals. NRMP is a private, not-for-profit organization established at the request of medical students to provide an orderly and fair mechanism to match applicants and open residency positions.

***About Albert Einstein College of MedicineAlbert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University is one of the nation’s premier centers for research, medical education and clinical investigation. During the 2014-2015 academic year, Einstein is home to 742 M.D. students, 212 Ph.D. students, 102 students in the combined M.D./Ph.D. program, and 292 postdoctoral research fellows. The College of Medicine has more than 2,000 full-time faculty members located on the main campus and at its clinical affiliates. In 2014, Einstein received $158 million in awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This includes the funding of major research centers at Einstein in aging, intellectual development disorders, diabetes, cancer, clinical and translational research, liver disease, and AIDS. Other areas where the College of Medicine is concentrating its efforts include developmental brain research, neuroscience, cardiac disease, and initiatives to reduce and eliminate ethnic and racial health disparities. Its partnership with Montefiore Medical Center, the University Hospital and academic medical center for Einstein, advances clinical and translational research to accelerate the pace at which new discoveries become the treatments and therapies that benefit patients. Through its extensive affiliation network involving Montefiore, Jacobi Medical Center—Einstein’s founding hospital, and three other hospital systems in the Bronx, Brooklyn and on Long Island, Einstein runs one of the largest residency and fellowship training programs in the medical and dental professions in the United States. For more information, please visit www.einstein.yu.edu, read our blog, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and view us on YouTube.