Medical School Matching
Match Day is coming up. Here’s how medical students game the residency system
In this article Kunal Sindhu addresses the system that matched medical school graduate to residency programs. In short, medical students submit applications to and interview at various residency programs around the country. They then rank their preferred programs, and submit this to The National Resident Matching Program (NMRP). The programs also submit a ranking of their preferred candidates, and based on the pair of rankings the NRMP matches the new doctors to hospitals.
We have discussed matching problems in class, but the algorithm used by the NRMP to construct these matches is a more complicated variation. In this case, every person is both a buyer and a seller, and they have no knowledge about the values of the other doctors or programs. The subject of this article is how some players on both sides attempt to gain information about other private values in order to determine their best course of action.