St. Luke’s medical students will learn location of next home on Match Day

Imagine standing in a balloon-filled room with your closest supporters and friends you’ve studied with for the past four years. You, and each of your peers, hold an envelope that will determine your fate. When the clock counts down, you open the envelope to learn where you will spend the next three to seven years of your life.
This describes Match Day, a national rite of passage for medical school students moving onto residency programs. A complex algorithm matches the students’ top choice of residencies with the programs’ top choice of students. On March 18, the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia welcomed its Class of 2022, including 30 students who studied exclusively at Temple/St. Luke’s School of Medicine in Bethlehem.
This year’s graduates spent nearly half of their medical education immersed in a global pandemic. This is the first year since 2019 that Match Day will be celebrated in person – a significant step forward.
“National Match Day is an unforgettable milestone for every medical student across the country,” said Dr. Shaden Eldakar-Hein, senior associate dean of Temple/St. Luke’s School of Medicine and Associate Professor, Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. “We are proud of graduating class of 2022 and look forward to learning where they will place. The residency programs they are matching to are adding amazing physicians to their teams.”

Born and raised in the Lehigh Valley, Nicholas Roma, a Muhlenberg College graduate, hoped to match with St. Luke’s combined residency and fellowship program in internal medicine and cardiology. It’s the nation’s only program of its kind.
“In 10 years, I envision my career at St. Luke’s as an interventional cardiologist,” he said, adding that St. Luke’s electrophysiologist and faculty Dr. Darren Traub nurtured his interest in the field. “Dr. Traub had a huge impact on my career. Interventional cardiology’s one of the few careers where you have immediate impact. Heart attack patients come in with terrible chest pain, and after a 20-minute procedure, it’s relieved. It’s extraordinary.”
The Temple/St. Luke’s Class of 2022 will graduate May 6 in Philadelphia. The medical school will welcome the incoming Class of 2026 in August.
For more information about Temple/St. Luke’s visit sluhn.org/som and for other graduate medical education programs at St. Luke’s University Health Network, visit sluhn.org/gme.