Match Day sees future MDs planning medical careers back home, and at Penn
Graduating students at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine gathered with friends and family for the annual Match Day celebration in the Atrium in the Jordan Medical Education Center; at noon, their opened envelopes revealed their next steps for residency.
The Perelman School of Medicine’s Match Day is a scene that plays out every year with new students and families, and new trends in most popular specialties and destinations. And yet it’s always marked by giddiness and hope, both by the soon-to-be-doctors and the faculty who guide them and cheer them on. “I am elated,” said Senior Vice Dean for Medical Education Suzanne Rose, “knowing the discoveries, opportunities, miracles, and magic” that lie ahead for these students in their medical careers.
Sydney Chambule from Mozambique(left) matched at Penn for urology.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)
On Friday, March 21, Penn Med students impatiently waited until exactly 12 p.m. to tear open the envelopes. They were greeted by the deans including Prithvi Sankar, assistant dean for Student Affairs and Residency Planning, who had met with almost all of the students with invaluable guidance and advice. They counted down from 10 with DaCarla Albright, associate dean for Student Affairs and Wellness. And then they screamed, jumped up and down, hugged, and someone even fired a confetti cannon, showering a portion of the crowd with colorful scraps of paper.
Many students will be remaining at Penn for residency. Sydney Chambule described his journey to an MD as “improbable.” Originally from Mozambique, he obtained scholarships to study in the United States and graduated from a pre-med program at a small college in western Pennsylvania. Chambule then landed a research job at Harvard for a few years and wound up not only earning admission to the Perelman School of Medicine but also getting a full scholarship, the Twenty-First Century Scholars Award.
With these gifts, his plan is to bring advances that U.S. patients take for granted back home to Mozambique. Where Chambule is from, cervical cancer—a largely preventable illness in much of the world—is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women. When his father was found to have metastatic prostate cancer, there was only one radiation machine in Mozambique, but it was broken for months, and the only place to get the necessary (and expensive) medicine to treat this late-stage cancer was in South Africa. “I realized that there really are significant barriers to care there that don’t exist everywhere,” said Chambule, whose father ended up passing away from the condition. “It was hard for me to see the limitations of my country’s health care system and how that impacted my father’s care.” As a result, Chambule switched his interest from neurosurgery to urology, with a plan to go back to Mozambique to practice. “I want to have a global health impact,” he said.
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