During a special celebration, 124 students at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai learned what the next phase of their career path would be at Match Day 2022, when each of them opened a carefully sealed envelope that revealed the U.S. residency program they had “matched” to and would be attending this year following graduation.
The graduating Class of 2022 matched to 25 specialties and to many of the most competitive residency programs in the nation, including the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, Yale New Haven Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Johns Hopkins and Washington University. A total of 52 students will remain within the Mount Sinai Health System for at least part of their residency training.
The most popular specialties for matching students were Internal Medicine (23), Emergency Medicine (10), Anesthesiology (14), General Surgery (9), Obstetrics and Gynecology (9), and Psychiatry (8).
On Match Day, the Mount Sinai Health System also extended residency offers to 557 students from across the country, including graduates from sixteen of the nation’s top twenty medical schools, who will arrive in July.
Meet three of the graduates, who display the range of experiences and accomplishments of this year’s class.
Kimia Ziadkhanpour
Kimia Ziadkhanpour, the first in her family to become a doctor, matched to anesthesia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Her interest in medicine began when she was six years old. In her native Tehran, she and her grandfather would hold hands as they traveled 30 miles on public buses to appointments with his cardiologist after he experienced a heart attack in his early 70s.
“At first his prognosis seemed good and his spirits were high; we would play in the yard every day,” she says. “But about a year and half later he died. My father tried to explain to me how he died, and none of it made sense to me. So I started searching for answers in books about science and anatomy.”
Indeed, as she grew older, Ms. Ziadkhanpour would wonder if her grandfather might have lived longer if he had had better care, or a doctor who was closer.
When she was seven, she moved to the United States, which opened doors to continue her interest in medicine later in life, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then later at the Icahn School of Medicine.
“One of the things I will take away from my experience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is the idea that we treat every patient as if they are family, regardless of their background. And we give the same level of care to our patients, whether they come through the doors of our student run East Harlem Health Outreach Partnership and have no insurance or if they are from the wealthy, Upper East Side,” says Ms. Ziadkhanpour.
Thomas Fetherston
Thomas Fetherston matched to Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii through the military match in December. The only veteran in the class of 2022, Mr. Fetherston, a Second Lieutenant, served in the U.S. Army, where his experiences as a combat medic reinforced his interest in emergency medicine.
Having served a tour in Afghanistan, he traveled full circle when he and colleagues at Mount Sinai worked together to hold a clinic for evacuees of Afghanistan in New Jersey, in collaboration with the Church World Service, a faith-based organization that provides development, disaster relief, and refugee assistance around the world.
“The clinic was an incredibly meaningful culmination of my four years of medical school and Army service. In just one single day, we were able to evaluate 28 patients, four of whom needed immediate treatment and another 15 who need follow up treatment,” he says. The Health System and the medical school place a huge value on the community and the importance of providing service to address inequities in health care access, and this is just one small example.”
Thomas Fetherston outside of Souf village, near Kandahar in Afghanistan
Parth Trivedi
Parth Trivedi matched to Internal Medicine at The Mount Sinai Hospital.
In his fourth year as a medical student, Mr. Trivedi co-authored an important paper that was published in Gastroenterology in January, 2022, which described a troubling increase in early-onset colorectal cancer and precancerous polyps among adults under the age of 50. It was the first large-scale study to look at precancerous polyps in this age group, representing a significant contribution to the literature on early onset pre-cancerous lesions in this age group.
Mr. Trivedi, who helped design the study and provide statistical analysis, says he hopes the study will make a difference.
“We hope that the data we shared and our analysis will ultimately inform decision making by policymakers and primary care doctors on whom to screen and how early,” he says.