Session 52 This week, we're diving into the match data and cover Pathology. Interestingly, Pathology is a small field that seems to be losing interest among graduating U.S. seniors according to the data. I'm digging into the results of the NRMP Residency Match Data 2017. As you're going through the process, you can understand what this data is telling you and what you should know to help you better plot a path. [02:40] General Overview Table 1 shows the match summary. Let me clarify first that the U.S. Seniors for the NRMP match data means U.S. students in an allopathic/MD program who are still in school. So a student could have graduated from an allopathic program and now applying to residency. Maybe they didn't get in the first time or took a gap year for some reason. Caribbean students and international medical grads, foreign and U.S. citizen international medical grads are not counted as U.S. Seniors. DO students are not counted as U.S. Seniors. Back to the data, there are 159 programs in Pathology with 601 spots. It's a very small specialty. Just to give you a comparison, Anesthesiology has 1,202 positions with 124 programs. So it has less programs but double the spots. This said, Anesthesiology has much bigger residency programs than Pathology. Unfilled programs for Pathology is 33. It ranks up there with a lot of other programs that go unfilled. It's interesting to know why this is. U.S. Seniors who applied are 232 out of 601 spots. Let's say out of 150+ medical schools in total, only one and a half students per medical school are applying to Pathology. So it's not a lot of senior medical students are applying to Pathology. There are 876 total applicants for those 601 spots. Even though there were more applicants than positions, they still went unfilled. Out of the students who filled Pathology, only 36% were U.S. Seniors and 91% of all the spots were filled. Pathology does not have PGY-2 positions and it doesn't have any physician positions here. "It's a good number of programs, but very small programs." [06:25] Matches by Specialty and Applicant Type and Trends Table 2 of the NRMP Match Data 2017 shows the matches by specialty and the applicant types. Out of 601 spots in Pathology, only 545 were filled. This data is only pre-SOAP.  Let's see if they filled the programs after the SOAP. Out of the 545 filled, there were 216 U.S. Seniors who were accepted. There were 25 U.S. graduates, 32 osteopathic students, no Canadians, 57 U.S. international medical graduates, 215 non-U.S. citizen international medical graduates, and 56 unfilled spots. Table 3 shows how many spots are available each year from 2012 through 2017. Every year, it goes up by 2.1% or 2.2%. So it's a slow steady rise in the number of spots available. Table 8 shows us the number of positions offered and the percent filled by U.S. Seniors and all applicants from 2013 to 2017. There was a dip from 2015 to 2016. The number of U.S. Seniors that filled those spots went from 45.1% in 2013 to 42.9% in 2014, then 46.6% in 2015 and down to 42.8% in 2016, and further down to 35.9% in 2017. There's been a pretty sharp decline of U.S. Seniors filling up those spots. "There are less U.S. Seniors who seem to be interested in going into Pathology." Table 9 shows the number of all applicants that matched by specialty from 2013 to 2017. 2% of all students that matched, matched into Pathology. Anesthesiology is 4.1%, Emergency Medicine is 7.4%, Family Medicine is 11.6%, and Internal Medicine is 25.6%. Orthopedic Surgery is 2.6%. It's the only one that's close to compare Pathology with. Neurology is 1.7% and Medicine-Pediatrics is 1.3%. [10:42] U.S. Seniors, Osteopathic Students, Foreign-Trained Physicians Table 10 shows U.S. Seniors that matched by specialty. 1.2% of U.S. Seniors matched into Pathology. This is less than last year of 1.5% and less than a year before at 1.7%. Table 11 shows osteopathic students that matched. 2.1% of all osteopathic students matched into Pa