Doctors-to-Be Meet Their Matches
While Match Day this year meant balloons and champagne at home and friends and family joining the celebration via Zoom rather than an on-campus party, the happy tears and elation of this year’s graduating MDs from the Tufts University School of Medicine remained the same. Four students from the class of 2021 shared where they’ve matched for their residencies and how their journeys at Tufts have prepared them for their next steps.
Elizabeth Moss, M21, GBS21, aspiring pediatrician
The Sharewood Project is a cool thing—it’s an entirely student-run free clinic in Malden. From day one, students are really encouraged to volunteer. We partner with Cambridge Health Alliance and family medicine physicians for supervision, but students are the ones doing the boots-on-the-ground work. I served as the executive director for a year, and the most rewarding part was setting the broader vision for improving the clinic, such as creating a school physicals day. One day in August we took over the Salvation Army building, and did a full day of school physicals for kids who needed it.
From the first weeks of my pediatrics rotation, I was really drawn to kids as a patient population. They just have this joy about them even when they are very sick. They are so resilient and positive. It just feels really good to make kids better and send them into the world. There’s also a lot more social support for kids than there tends to be for adult patients. If they need help with school or housing, there are resources to draw on for that.
I really see myself splitting between research and clinical practice—that’s my motivation for doing the dual M.D./Ph.D. degree. In my future research, I’m interested in transgender youth and differences of sexual development, such as how hormone treatments affect health going forward. How can we do things early to set these kids up for lifelong health? That’s a question I’m interested in pursuing.
Her match: Boston Children’s Hospital. She says: “Boston Children’s was my number one choice so I’m really happy. It’s great to know I get to stay in the Boston area and go to this amazing program!”