Opinion: Ideas for easing medical students’ Match Day ‘frenzy’
Friday, March 15, is Match Day. It’s a big deal in the medical community: At schools across the nation, fourth-year students who will get their medical degrees in a few short weeks learn their hospital assignments for the next three to seven years.
The National Residency Matching Program is an admirable invention. Now more than 30 years old, it is the system through which medical students get their first paid, professional positions. It corrected past abuses that took advantage of students, often pressuring them to accept binding offers within 24 hours of a residency interview. The Match is sufficiently noteworthy that its creator, Alvin Ross, won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on matching theory. His algorithm continues to place half of U.S. medical school graduates in their first-choice programs. Other professions and selection processes could be improved by using a similar matching system.
Yet the Match and what leads
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