Match Day is a life-changing milestone for medical students across the country. At exactly the same moment, they all find out where they’ll spend the next several years training as doctors. For the University of Hawaiʻi John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) Class of 2025, that moment came at 6 a.m. on March 21, when 71 students gathered with family and friends on campus to open their envelopes and discover where their medical journey would continue.
“It’s pretty surreal,” said Awapuhi Lee, at JABSOM. “In my first year, I didn’t realize how quickly Match Day would come, but then it was here.”
Lee, a Native Hawaiian born and raised in Pearl City who attended Kamehameha, learned she will continue serving her state as part of JABSOM’s psychiatry residency program.
“It means a lot. It’s one of the main reasons I went into medicine, to begin with,” Lee said. “Being able to stay home and train with the population that I’m going to work with in the future was really important to me.”
Local students staying home
With the state continuing to face a physician shortage, JABSOM had a strong showing in the primary care specialties that Hawaiʻi needs the most.
Amanda Tsuhako, an ʻIolani graduate, is one of those staying in the islands.
“It’s so important to me to stay home here in Hawaiʻi and take care of the patients I want to help in the future. I plan to stay home and hopefully move to a neighbor island,” she said.
Working on a neighbor island was never on her mind until she visited Lānaʻi during her second year at JABSOM.
“Six of us were sent there with the Rural Health Medicine Group, and working with the community and seeing how much they band together to overcome the limited access to healthcare and take care of each other and keep everyone on the island as much as possible, I just want to help that community so they can live long, healthy lives on Lānaʻi,” Tsuhako said.
Of the Class of 2025, 41% will train in Hawaiʻi for residency. That is an increase of 10 percentage points from 2024. Nathan Kim, a Mililani High graduate, is entering JABSOM’s Orthopaedic Surgery residency program.
“Being born and raised here, I went to undergrad here, medical school here, and now I get to do residency here,” Kim said. “I think it just makes so much more sense to be able to continue this journey, and I know I want to serve the people of Hawaiʻi.”
That call to serve our population rings true for many JABSOM students. While staying in Hawaiʻi to learn and serve is a priority for many JABSOM students, some complete residency on the U.S. continent as the state doesn’t have residency programs in all medical specialties.
Read more about the future doctors at JABSOM’s website.
