WCMC-Q students excel at Match Day with U.S. residency offers

March, 2013

Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q) is celebrating after 31 students were offered residency places at hospitals for after they graduate.

The annual Match Day event, on March 15, was held at the WCMC-Q campus in the presence of family, friends, faculty and staff members where the students learned in which hospital they would be doing their residency training for the next two to seven years of their medical careers.

Eight WCMC-Q graduates will now be going to the internationally respected NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, two to Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) and the 21 others are heading off to equally impressive hospitals in the U.S.

WCMC-Q Dean, Dr. Javaid Sheikh congratulated all the students and wished them well for the rest of their careers.

Dr. Sheikh said: “This is a fantastic achievement by our students. These impressive results are a wonderful tribute to their hard work and effort as well as a clear demonstration of the quality of education they have received at WCMC-Q. Our faculty and staff are very proud of each and every one of them.”

For Mason Al Nouri, HMC was the place of choice for his residency in orthopedic surgery. Mason said his time at WCMC-Q had been great preparation for the future.

He said: “It’s been six years and it’s been a great experience. From the start it’s been a whole rollercoaster of adapting to new information and medical knowledge and it prepares you well for residency as you need to learn a lot in a short space of time.”

Mason added that he applied for HMC because of its reputation.

“Orthopedic surgery is a growing field that I really wanted to pursue,” he said, “and I wanted to pursue it in an institute that is well known and good and HMC is the best place in the region.”

While Mason is at HMC, Haya Ahram will be taking a three-year residency in family medicine at University of Connecticut School of Medicine in the U.S.

Of her time at WCMC-Q, she said: “It’s been wonderful. Education wise it’s been excellent, help was always there and the environment was always warm and friendly.”

Haya said she chose family medicine as it will allow her to treat a wide range of ages, conditions and pathogens and allow her to provide continuity of care to the whole family. In the future she said she might pursue a fellowship in palliative care and possibly even enter the world of academia – although she would always want to continue practicing as a clinician.

Match Day is an intensely competitive experience that can shape budding medical careers. It is the culmination of a four-year journey for graduating medical students, one of the final hurdles before graduation but equally important in their emerging careers in medicine.

More than 40,000 graduating medical students around the world competed for approximately 25,000 residency positions in the largest match in the National Resident Matching Program's history. More than half of U.S. seniors matched to their first choice and graduating students from WCMC-Q showed similar results.