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.