Today’s inane image of the day:
If you’ve landed on this page, I assume you are an anesthesiology residency applicant or soon-to-be one. Please make sure to review my 2024 Match blog entry as my goal with this entry is to build upon my thoughts from last year and offer additional insights/tools to be prepared for Match 2025.
The elephant in the room – anesthesiology is becoming more competitive
I don’t think I would have matched at MGH if I had to apply again today with my application from 4th year. I do think that I would have matched somewhere in anesthesiology based on my overall application, but maybe not. There’s some component of randomness to this process with how competitive the specialty has become.
The NRMP 2024 Main Residency Match data shows that there were zero unfilled spots for 2000 offered positions. When I matched into the specialty in 2015, there were 28 unfilled PGY-1 (intern) year spots and 37 unfilled PGY-2 (advanced) spots out of 1600 total offered positions (4% of total spots went unfilled). Also, notably, when I applied there were 1859 applicants for the 1600 offered positions, so at least 259 applicants went unmatched; in 2024, 3034 applicants applied for the 2000 total offered positions. That left 1034 applicants that did not match into anesthesiology. That’s a 5x higher unmatched rate than almost a decade ago when I matched. Things have certainly changed in the last decade.
If you want to see the slides from my August 2024 ASA presentation, they are available here: https://bit.ly/3zb9IdH
Read more