CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Priscilla Yee, left, Gina Fujikami, Traci Murakami and Sera Lyn Yee were all smiles yesterday after opening their envelopes. The two Yees are headed to California Pacific Medical Center, while both Fujikami and Murakami were accepted at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center California. All are in the field of internal medicine.
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The envelope, please
UH medical students gather to find out where they will perform their residencies
The class started out like the cast of "Lost" and ended up like the cast of "Survivor," said Dr. Jerris Hedges, new dean of the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine.
He was describing the school's class of 2008, which had to spend the first academic year at Tokai University because of the Oct. 30, 2004, flooding on the Manoa campus.
Some anatomy classes were held in the Stan Sheriff Center, and students did their homework at Starbucks, Hedges said, calling it "impressive ingenuity."
In September 2005 they were able to move to a new medical school in Kakaako, developed because of the school's former dean, Ed Cadman, Hedges said.
"This class deserves a lot of recognition," he said, addressing 56 graduating students and family members at a traditional "Match Day" ceremony yesterday in the school's auditorium.
The UH medical students were among more than 15,000 seniors at medical schools across the country opening envelopes at the same time to learn where they will go for residency programs after graduating.
The students' choices are matched with teaching college residencies by a computerized National Residency Match Program. It reported that 94 percent of seniors this year were paired with their first choice.
CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Hy Gia Park, who gave birth to two children during her time at the school, held up her envelope and daughter Mia yesterday. She is in the field of psychiatry and going to the University of Colorado's school of medicine in Denver.
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Cassie Lee of Kailua is in the 6 percent who did not get what they wanted. She is going to the University of Southern California to train in pathology, but said she wanted to continue training at UH.
"It would have been nice to spend four years and be pampered at home," she said with tears in her eyes. "But it's a happy day. It's such an honor to go somewhere."
"We'll take good care of you," classmate James Fernandez of American Samoa told her with a hug. "A bunch of us will be at USC." He will be training in diagnostic radiation, he said.
Besides working toward their own graduation, this year's class helped Hy Gia Park get through her studies and internships while having two babies.
Park's husband, Charles, was finishing a fellowship in addiction psychiatry at the University of Colorado's medical school in Denver. So she was alone when their first child, Mia, was born here May 26, 2005.
She said she applied to the UH medical school because her parents, Chau Phung and Chaun Shing Young, and grandmother The Vuong live here, but they could not help much with baby-sitting because they run a Vietnamese restaurant.
She said her father-in-law, Chang Oh Park, retired from Coors Brewery and came here from Denver to help her until his wife became ill and he had to go home.
She said her classmates "all pitched in to help me raise my baby." Maria Ham, going to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Massachusetts to train as a general surgeon, organized a rotating baby-sitting schedule.
Thirteen graduates have UH residencies. The others will be scattered across the mainland, with the largest number, 25, in California. Primary care and internal medicine are the leading areas of study.
Cadman, who stepped down as dean in early 2005 because of a neurodegenerative disease, was among those at the ceremony. "He is the single best thing that ever happened to the medical school," said David Waters, professor of ophthalmology surgery.