Of the 37 fourth-year students in the Tufts University School of Medicine – MaineHealth Maine Track program, 12 will be spending their residencies in Maine.
PORTLAND – Fourth-year medical students in the Tufts University School of Medicine – MaineHealth (TUSM-MH) Maine Track program celebrated “Match Day” on Friday, learning which residency program they’ll be joining for the next three to seven years. Every one of the 37 Maine Track students in this year’s class matched to a high-quality program. Eleven of them found out they would be staying in Portland as residents at MaineHealth Maine Medical Center and one matched with Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.
Match Day is the culmination of the National Resident Matching Program that fourth-year medical students use to enter their next stage of training. Students apply to residency programs in the fall and programs interview those they’re interested in. Students then rank the residencies, with the program that they would most like to join at the top, and residency programs enter a ranked list of students. The NRMP matches students and programs and on Match Day, students find out their residency “match.” This is the fourth year that Maine Track students opened the envelopes containing their match with family and friends in Portland. Previously, they joined other Tufts students in Boston for the celebration.
“It’s so exciting to discover not only where I’m ending up but where everyone else is too,” said Owen Doan, M26, who matched with MaineHealth Maine Medical Center in pediatrics. “It’s special. I have a family here in Maine Track.”
The Maine Track program is a partnership between MaineHealth and Tufts formed 18 years ago to help address the shortage of doctors in Maine, provide financial assistance to aspiring medical students from Maine and develop an innovative curriculum focused on community-based education. Students receive classroom instruction in Boston before coming to Maine for hands-on training. To date, 479 physicians have graduated from the Maine Track Program. 104 graduates known to have completed their training are now practicing physicians in Maine.
Scholarships are a key component of the Maine Track program, and they are more important now than ever as Congress recently voted to cap graduate loans at $200,000, significantly less than the average cost of a medical education. MaineHealth awards more than $2 million in scholarship funds to 80 students each year through private donations as well as the state’s Doctors for Maine’s Future program, a public-private partnership in which MaineHealth matches state-funded scholarships of up to $25,000 per Maine student. A bill to maintain funding for Doctors for Maine’s Future scholarships is currently sitting on the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee table where it is competing with other state initiatives for funding.
At the same time, MaineHealth is addressing the rising cost of medical education by setting an ambitious goal of raising additional endowed funds to increase the scholarship awards it offers to $40,000 in the years ahead.
“Maintaining affordability for our program is critical to attracting students from Maine who want to practice in Maine,” said Dr. Dena Whitesell, assistant dean for students in the TUSM-MH Maine Track program. “We are hopeful that the Legislature will continue to support the Doctors for Maine’s Future program and are grateful to our MaineHealth benefactors for their investment in Maine students.”
MaineHealth also filled all 17 of its categorical residency programs, two rural tracks and one rural concentration.