Classroom study, exams, clinical training, research projects, and residency program interviews. It has been a blur of countless hours of hard work over the past several years for the USC School of Medicine Greenville fourth-year students.   
  
On Friday, March 21, it was time to celebrate and look ahead to the next step in their medical journeys. At the Match Day reception, SOMG’s Class of 2025 medical students opened sealed envelopes containing the official letters of where they matched for residency programs.   
  
“All of the hard work has finally paid off,” said Daniel Ngov, moments after he learned he matched to the pathology residency program at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Ngov, who has spoken to middle and high school students about the medical profession, looks forward to teaching and mentoring students studying medicine during residency.   
 
Click for the complete list of the USC School of Medicine Greenville’s 2025 Match Day results »

Match Day is an annual ceremony when tens of thousands of graduating medical students simultaneously find out where they will spend the next several years in a United States medical residency program learning a specialty, ultimately leading to board certification in their area of medicine.  

Next phase of training  

The Class of 2025 has already shown their unwavering commitment to providing care for our community. Collectively, they have served over 1,000 hours to the greater Greenville community through community clinics, health screenings, education and outreach, and serving as EMTs for local events. All the while diligently working to meet the demands and challenges of medical school through many hours of classroom study and clinical training.   

Residency training is the next step, putting students’ academic knowledge and clinical preparation into practice in an intense full-time clinical setting within their specified fields of medicine. The medical student journey to residency is a rigorous one. It requires pre-clinical classroom preparation, clinical rotations, hours of research, and community service, along with a highly competitive residency application process. Students select programs to apply to, are invited for interviews, and then create a preference list of their programs. Residency programs do the same but rank students. At 12 pm on the third Friday of every March, students find out their residency program placements. “Match Day marks a milestone in our medical students’ journey toward becoming the physicians they’ve worked diligently to become,” said SOMG Dean Phyllis MacGilvray.  

“It affirms the specialty identities they have chosen to pursue,” said MacGilvray. “Upon graduating from medical school, they will transition into the next phase of their training, known as graduate medical education. This journey begins with a year of internship and continues through the completion of their residency programs, ultimately leading to board certification in their selected specialties. Today marks the start of that specialty identity for our students. Match Day is the moment when they transition from being medical students to becoming pediatricians, surgeons, obstetricians, family physicians, psychiatrists, and much more!” 

The USC SOMG Class of 2025 achieved a 99% match rate and matched in 20 specialties. Primary was a central focus this year, with 43% of students matching into primary care, which includes family medicine, internal medicine, internal medicine-pediatrics, and pediatrics. 

Students are headed to residency programs all across the country, from major academic institutions to rural health programs at community hospitals to military bases in alignment with their career goals. Class of 2025 medical student Brandon Xavier will be heading on a “big adventure” to the University of Arizona in Phoenix for a residency in family medicine. “I am so excited and so grateful,” said Xavier. 

There are 20 students from the Class of 2025 who are staying right here in South Carolina, including 14 within the Upstate, for residency at 7 different medical centers which include Prisma Health in Greenville, Prisma Health in Columbia, Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), Spartanburg Medical Center, Trident Medical Center, Grand Strand Regional Medical Center, and AnMed Health.

“We are so excited to be able to stay and contribute to the community we have come to love,” said Mary Catherine Grant, who matched at Prisma Health in Greenville in pediatrics, along with her husband, Bo Layton who matched in orthopaedic surgery at Prisma Health in Greenville.