University Times

It's an annual tradition — Match Day, the suspenseful, exhilarating day when medical school grads learn where they will do their first-year residencies. The process begins with students visiting hospitals for interviews, then listing the institutions where they would prefer to work. Hospitals, in turn, rank the students. A national residency matching program takes the students' lists and the hospitals' lists and, by computer, matches students with hospitals. Medical schools are not allowed to release the results to students until noon on Match Day. On March 18, the Pitt medical school's 1998 graduating class gathered in Scaife Hall for the news. At right, interim Dean George Michalopoulos congratulates Steve Zawilla, who will go to the Chippenham Medical Center in Richmond, Va. Above, Laurent Brard and son Joshua learn that Brard will do his residency at the Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island.