At Annual Match Day, BU Graduating Medical Students Learned Where They Will Train Next
Students praised for being resilient, passionate about helping others, deeply committed

Michael Batista (CAMED’25), who was accepted into the psychiatric residency program at Mount Sinai Hospital, celebrates with Lillian Vo (CAMED’25), who placed in pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine. Photos by Jake Mackey
At Annual Match Day, BU Graduating Medical Students Learned Where They Will Train Next
Students praised for being resilient, passionate about helping others, deeply committed
Last Friday, 167 Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine fourth-year medical students gathered at the George Sherman Union’s Metcalf Ballroom to learn where they would be heading as residents, the next stop on their journey to the practice of medicine. At exactly noon, they opened their envelopes, and nervous anticipation gave way to relief, happiness, cries of excitement, and the embrace of family and friends as the students learned the residency training program where they would spend the next three to seven years, learning their specialty under the supervision of experienced physicians.
“The days are long, but the years are short,” Karen Antman, dean of the medical school and provost of the Medical Campus, told students on what is her last Match Day in these roles. After two decades leading the school and campus, Antman will be returning to the faculty once her successor is named.
“Not only do our faculty think that you are going to make outstanding physicians, but the programs that have chosen you think you will as well,” she said.
Organized by the Student Affairs Office and the Student Match Day Committee, Match Day is an annual ritual held at all medical schools across the country, where graduating medical students open white envelopes simultaneously on the third Friday in March. Since the 1950s, Match Day has relied upon an algorithm overseen by the National Resident Matching Program to match students to residency programs according to preference lists developed by the students and the programs.
“You have participated in research that will contribute to science across disciplines, you have spent hours in service to our Boston community, and you have done all of this while successfully completing your own requirements and course work, taking board exams, and managing life that continues to happen. You are more than ready for residency,” said Priya Garg, associate dean of medical education at the medical school.
“Hold on to your values and remember that MD that you earned will make people listen to you…so use that microphone wisely,” said Angela Jackson, the medical school’s associate dean of student affairs. “You are ready because of all the hard work that you’ve put in, and wherever that envelope takes you, your patients will be lucky to have you.”
“You all have been enormously resilient, passionate about helping others, and deeply committed to your goals. I am really grateful to have known all of you,” Kristen Goodell, associate dean of admissions at the medical school, said to the students before they opened their envelopes.

“I love New York. It’s where my family is; it’s where I’m from. I’m so happy,” said Nisha Mathur (CAMED’25), who celebrated being accepted into an internal medicine residency at New York University Grossman School of Medicine with her extended family, including her grandmother, a physician who traveled from India for Match Day.
Mathur was director of the Stop Shackling Patients Coalition, a collaborative effort to end universal shackling of prisoners while they are receiving medical treatment, led by BU medical and public health students and faculty. She was inspired to enter medical school by her grandfather in India and by her mother, who immigrated to the United States, both physicians caring for the underserved.
As a child, she often spent summers in India with her grandmother and her late grandfather.
“He was a pediatrician and he had his clinic in the basement of his house. He used to have patients lined up down the street, and he would see them until very late,” Mathur said, sometimes not joining the family until the last patient left at midnight.
“That was my first exposure to medicine, and I think it really inspired me,” she said. She also was influenced by the long-term relationships and the trust that her mother, a primary care doctor in the Bronx, had with her patients.
“I think both of those experiences combined to inspire me from a young age to know that this is what I want to do,” Mathur said.
It took Rachel Ingraham (CAMED’25, Questrom’25), who matched into the University of California, San Francisco–East Bay, general surgery residency program, a little longer than most of her classmates to arrive at Match Day. Before entering medical school in 2019, the Minnesota native had spent four years as a research assistant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, followed by four years at Boston Medical Center, first as a patient experience coordinator and then as one of three patient advocates at the hospital.
Her healthcare experiences convinced Ingraham that as a physician she wanted to care for the most vulnerable patients, while also being a healthcare leader focused on medical ethics. She will receive a combined MD/MBA from BU, along with a master’s degree in bioethics from Harvard. Work on her master’s degrees, and a year off to care for her ailing grandfather, extended her time in medical school. Ingraham envisions a future in academia and a practice as a general surgeon, with a focus on shaping healthcare policy and ethics.
“It’s a beautiful city,” Ingraham said of San Francisco, but it was the Oakland-area community she’d be serving that drew her to the program. “The culture there is so unique, and the patient population definitely aligns with my values, and who I am. I look forward to being very well trained there. I know that they are just top-notch, and I am confident I will come out as a really great surgeon,” she said.
“I’m so excited for what lies ahead,” said Nicholas King (CAMED’25), who matched into the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School general surgery residency program. He also had some gap years before entering medical school. Following graduation from Yale University, where he majored in cell biology with a computational focus, King, who is from Cambridge, Mass., worked for three years as a respite case manager at Boston’s Healthcare for the Homeless, responsible for planning discharges for patients from the medical respite facility to a substance use program or transitional housing.
*“It was very challenging work, and I have a ton of respect for the people who do it,” he said. “I learned a lot about barriers to care, things like people not having time to get to their appointments, or having other obligations, like work or childcare, or other things going on in their life.”

“I’m really looking forward to continuing to learn more and treating patients. I’m really happy,” said fourth-year medical student Ana Paula Gushken (ENG’20, CAMED’25), who is from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and comes from an extended family of physicians. She matched into a pediatric residency from Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.
Gushken’s sister Fernanda is also a medical student, but in Brazil. She traveled to BU Friday so she and her sister could open their Match Day announcements together. The sisters embraced and joined the choruses of screams and shouts around them as Fernanda matched into the University of Miami in psychiatry.
Their mother is a pediatrician, their father an OB/GYN, and aunts and uncles on both sides of the family are doctors, too.
“From my experience, I think it’s hard to grow up and not be amazed and see how amazing medicine is—that you can really make a difference and take care of people in the most vulnerable moments in their lives,” said Ana Paula Gushkin, who earned a BS in biomedical engineering and early acceptance into medical school through BU’s Modular Medical/Dental Integrated Curriculum program.
“I was really excited to be able to continue here at BU, because I think what’s unique is the focus on advocacy and serving underserved populations,” she said.
Heather Miselis, associate dean of alumni affairs at the medical school, told the assembled students: “Medicine will challenge you; it will shape you, and it will sometimes exhaust you. But the passion and values that brought you to this school of medicine will sustain you. Hold on to them and take the time to care for yourself. Continue to live by the words ‘I can do it,’ because you can.”

Following graduation in May, 39 medical students will be staying in Massachusetts, 14 at BMC. New York (34), California (26), and Pennsylvania (12) were the next most popular states. The class matched in a range of programs, with the top specialties being internal medicine (50), pediatrics (21), emergency medicine and surgery (14 each), and anesthesiology (10).
During the festivities, the convocation speaker for the MD/PhD ceremony was announced: Sheri Fink, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of the nonfiction book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, about choices made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and that the MD Class of 2025 had selected Richard Wu (CAMED’25) as their student speaker.
See more photos from Match Day here.
Doug Fraser is a Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine public relations associate; he can be reached at fraserd@bu.edu.
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