‘MUSC’s Match Day’: Over 100 students find out their residency placement

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - Med school graduate students across the nation, including in the Lowcountry, are spending the day celebrating.

Over 100 students at MUSC found out where they will be spending their residency program on Friday morning at Charleston Music Hall.

Exactly 159 students got their match, with 44 staying at MUSC.

A total of 36% are staying in the state of South Carolina for their residency, which is a little higher than average, according to MUSC.

“We know that a lot of students will practice where they do their residency,” MUSC College of Medicine Dean Dr. Terry Steyer said. “About 70% stay within 30 miles where they do their residency, so keeping that number in state is really important.”

The students going out of state are going anywhere from Johns Hopkins University to UCLA.

The journey was not without hurdles for students, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit while they were in their second year.

“The biggest challenge definitely was COVID,” Hannah Robinson, who matched with Emory University, said. “So much had changed for us that we just didn’t know what to do. Normally we could watch classes in person, but we had to switch online, we were having to figure out how we were going to start clinicals with the mask mandates, and so COVID definitely made this journey really hard but it showed how resilient we all are.”

The students credit their teachers for helping them get through the unique circumstances.

“The faculty here was great about putting everything online, and then we were fortunate enough third year to actually go back in-person and get to learn in the hospital like they did before,” Harrison Gaines, who matched with MUSC, said.

MUSC made adjustments to ensure these students were still receiving the education and resources needed to succeed.

“We had to recreate the whole anatomy lab, structure them so that they were scattered in the time that they showed up to keep social distancing up, and then we actually did examinations in multiple rooms, again so they could be socially distanced while they were taking their exams,” Steyer said.

The challenges COVID presented did not stop the 159 students on Friday from saying “I did it.”

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