More than a dozen national universities’ residency programs accepted more than 150 GW fourth-year medical students in specialties like internal medicine and ophthalmology as part of an annual matching ceremony at Lisner Auditorium last month.

Families and friends huddled around the students as they joined others across the country in opening letters dictating the next three years of their medical journeys on Match Day. The School of Medicine and Health Sciences Class of 2022 is the first graduating class to hold the annual Match Day ceremony in person since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.

Lorenzo Norris, the SMHS associate dean for student affairs and administration, said an average of 167 fourth-year medical students have participated in the National Resident Matching Program’s Main Residency Match — an online algorithm that randomly assigns medical students to residency programs based on each other’s rankings — in each of the past five years.

He said more than 40,000 applicants across the country applied for the 2022 national matching program in July 2021.

“Match Day symbolizes the transition from undergraduate to graduate medical education, the day when they learn which residency training program they will attend as they begin their careers as physicians,” an official statement from the NRMP reads.

Students said Match Day marks their first opportunity to apply the medical skills they learned from lectures to clinical settings across the country as they learn to become practicing physicians over the next three years.

Allison Barshay, a fourth-year medical student specializing in emergency medicine, said these students have spent the year leading up to Match Day choosing the medical field to join and which university and hospital to attend to kickstart their professional careers.

She said medical students rank their residency programs based on personal preferences while residency program directors rank applicants based on their academic records and interviews that take place in the fall.

Barshay said she matched to Rhode Island Hospital, which is affiliated with Brown University, and anticipates completing independent medical tasks like writing prescription orders for patients and learning about surgical procedures as a practicing physician.

“There’s a countdown to noon exactly when you’re allowed to open your envelopes and see where you matched, and then after noon, it was basically a couple of minutes of crazy, chaotic celebration,” she said.

Christbel Chan, a student specializing in ophthalmology, said she matched back to SMHS and its ophthalmology department for her residency program, where she’s excited to work closely with the attending doctors and residents she already knows as a practicing student physician.

Chan said she hopes to continue polishing skills like diagnosing specific eye pathologies and learning how to use different lenses that can view the back of the eye known as the retina.

She said she might return to work for SMHS or the GW Hospital after she completes her residency because she wants to build her network in the District and help teach future medical students and residents who are interested in ophthalmology.

“It’s just the beginning because this is when we’re officially going to be physicians and officially known as doctors, so there’s obviously a lot of responsibility that comes with that’s both terrifying and exciting,” she said.

Haley Bush, who is specializing in internal medicine, said she and her boyfriend matched to Duke University residency programs in internal medicine and orthopedic surgery, respectively. She said they both look forward to learning with experienced faculty members and working with new surgical procedures within their specialties.

She said she got to share the Match Day experience with her fellow classmates, who she learned with for the past four years, as everyone celebrated which residency programs they matched with.

“I’m really proud of our class for basically doing med school through a pandemic and then having really successful outcomes in terms of matching to places that we really want to go and are proud to be a part of,” she said.