Anxiety and relief at 'Match Day' event for UNM medical students

Mar. 17—ALBUQUERQUE — Glenn Ratmeyer scooted in close to his wife, Haelee, as he clutched the silver-gray envelope — perhaps for moral support, perhaps mindful of staying in frame for a FaceTime conversation with his brother on the phone propped in front of them.

Commotion swirled around the couple in the University of New Mexico Student Union Building ballroom Friday morning as dozens of Ratmeyer's UNM medical school classmates rushed to their friends and families with their own envelopes.

The chaos, excitement and palpable nerves were all part "Match Day," when tens of thousands of medical students around the country get the results of their residency match applications and learn where they will be spending the next several years of their medical education.

It's a lengthy process that involves medical students interviewing at programs all over the country and then ranking the sites they're open to, while those host sites do the same for its residency applicants.

This year saw an all-time nationwide high of 50,413 applicants, an increase of 4.7% from last year, according to the National Resident Matching Program. A total of 35,984 were matched to a post-graduate first year position, the organization said in a news release.

At the UNM event, 81 envelopes sat enticingly on long tables for two long hours while Ratmeyer and his class waited for the 10 a.m. mark, when students across the U.S. would find out at the same time where they match. The anticipation reached a comic breaking point a few minutes before the hour, when Dr. Teresa Vigil-Baca, UNM's senior associate dean for education, played out the clock by announcing she would be raffling off $250 Amazon gift cards.

"That's what I came for," Ratmeyer said, laughing. "Good vibes."

Path to medicine

Ratmeyer's path to medicine really began years before his time at UNM. His parents, John Ratmeyer, a longtime Gallup Indian Medical Center pediatrician, and Liliana Ratmeyer, a medical lab technologist, settled in New Mexico more than three decades ago.

Glenn Ratmeyer said he sees the Indian Health Service center's work in Gallup as crucial for the community.

"The system gets a lot of stigma," he said. "It's super underfunded, but it's essentially universal health care."

Seeing his parents do work they found meaningful and enjoyed was "sort of huge" to Glenn Ratmeyer, whose older brother Paul Ratmeyer is also a physician who attended UNM for both an undergraduate degree and medical school, and is now working in Memphis.

Glenn Ratmeyer attended Rehoboth Christian School in Gallup, where he met Haelee back in sixth grade. The couple, both 25, started dating their freshman year of high school and stayed together long distance during college.

Haelee Ratmeyer, who's from Saint Michaels, a small community on the Arizona side of the Navajo Nation, went to nursing school at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, while Glenn Ratmeyer was accepted to UNM's Combined BA/MD Degree Program.

The program, which launched in 2006, offers a last-dollar scholarship — meaning it covers all costs after all other financial aid resources have been awarded — to a group of graduating high school seniors from New Mexico or Navajo Nation schools to attend UNM on a medical school-bound track, said Dr. Robert Sapien, the program's director on the medical school side. From their freshman year, those students — 28 per year — are given provisional acceptance to UNM's medical school, based on academic performance and other requirements, including a community immersion program.

The program has a long-term goal "to get our graduates to come back and practice in New Mexico," Sapien said, adding the program has seen success. As of this academic year, 81 of the program's alumni have completed their training, and 53 of them are working as physicians in New Mexico, according to a UNM report. Of those, 23 are practicing medicine in their hometowns.

Glenn Ratmeyer said being a part of that group was especially meaningful to him, as his first two years of medical school were during the heart of the coronavirus pandemic.

"That was huge for me because if not, I would have felt even more isolated," he said.

Classmate Kevin Martinez, 26, agreed.

"People end up making study groups and support each other through med school, but it's hard to do that when you're on Zoom," said Martinez, who was born and raised in Santa Fe. "I already knew about 30 [people]."

To match or not to match

For all the fanfare of Match Day, the more nerve-wracking day is actually the Monday prior.

That's when the National Residency Matching Program reaches out to all prospective applicants to let them know whether they've been matched in the first place — which is no guarantee for any medical student, no matter how bright.

Glenn Ratmeyer watched his older brother — a "huge role model," he said — deal with the disappointment after not matching with any of the highly competitive programs he applied to following his fourth year of medical school.

"He was a very strong candidate," Glenn Ratmeyer said of Paul, who spent a year doing a patchwork of different types of medical work and research before reapplying successfully. "It was, like, super devastating."

Recalling his brother's experience, Ratmeyer included every program he interviewed in his rankings, hoping for a spot in one of the limited number of sites with a "med peds" program, a combination of internal medicine and pediatric specialty.

When he found out Monday he had matched with a program, he was relieved more than anything, and he quickly moved on to being "just excited to see where we end up."

He and his wife already had talked through all the locations and were open to any of them, he said. Their first choice was the University of Utah, a program with strong rural and Indian Health Service ties Ratmeyer called his "dream job."

Programs in Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama and Minnesota were all close behind.

'Lots of emotions'

When 10 a.m. finally arrived, Ratmeyer rushed to the tables of envelopes with a flood of classmates, scanned until he saw his name, then returned to his wife's side. His parents, who drove in a day earlier from Gallup, leaned in, as did Haelee's parents, Emerson and Lorrinda Horace.

Ratmeyer ripped open his envelopes and held up the paper as he and and his wife quickly scanned it. Cheers erupted around the ballroom and Ratmeyer's face crumpled just a little as he saw the program name: the University of Utah, his first choice.

He turned the paper toward his brother on FaceTime, then kissed Haelee before his parents rushed around the table to congratulate him.

Across the room, Martinez also matched with his first choice, a general surgery residency at the University of Washington. He said he was overjoyed — but his time in the Pacific Northwest won't last forever.

"It's exciting," he said. "[But] I want to come back here."

Glenn and Haelee Ratmeyer, meanwhile, headed into the throng, congratulating friends and comparing notes.

"Lots of emotions," Glenn Ratmeyer said. "But I know it's the right place for us."