Cheers, hugs and congratulations at Pritzker Match Day

After four years of medical school, Match Day is the big reveal. At 11 a.m. on Friday, March 16, members of the Pritzker School of Medicine Class of 2018 tore open their envelopes to learn where they will be spending the next several years of their training.

Cue cheers, shouts, hugs, handshakes and a lot of outgoing text messages.

"I want you to know that we are proud of each and every one of you, not only for what’s inside the envelope, but for the impact you’ve made on our institution and on our campus during the time you’ve been here,” Holly Humphrey, MD, Pritzker’s dean for medical education, told the class. “We as faculty know that wherever you go — here or scattered to places around the country — that you will make that same kind of impact elsewhere… And we’re particularly proud of the ways in which you will help transform people’s lives."

The most popular specialty chosen this year by Pritzker’s 97 matching students was internal medicine, with 26 students or 27 percent of the class. Other popular specialties are pediatrics (12), psychiatry (10), emergency medicine and general surgery (8 each), and anesthesiology and obstetrics-gynecology (7 each).

Twenty-two students will remain at University of Chicago Medicine for all or part of their training. Fourteen students are headed to residencies at Harvard-affiliated hospitals. Other hospitals accepting multiple Pritzker recruits are the University of Michigan, University of Texas programs, and University of Washington (4 each), and Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, and University of California-San Francisco (3 each).

Watch the countdown and the big moment: