The following is a joint statement from Isabella Grumbach, MD, PhD, Interim Chair and DEO of the Department of Internal Medicine, and Manish Suneja, MD, Vice Chair for Education and Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program.

It is with great pleasure that we introduce you to the incoming class of interns for the 2024-25 academic year. Today, this accomplished group of medical students takes a giant step on their lengthy path toward becoming physicians. In a few more months, they will soon cross yet another when they graduate from medical school and begin the next phase of their training with us here at Iowa. We are very excited for them to join us.

It has been a long time since our program did not completely fill its open slots, but we always want to acknowledge the effort it takes to avoid that outcome. The months-long interview process and scheduling is down to a science mostly due to the extraordinary organizational skills of Abbey Gilpin, Cindy Batzkiel, Denise Floerchinger and Stacy Sueppel. The quality of the panels and presentations for each interview day is largely due to our Chief Resident for recruitment, Reed Johnson. Each of our Chief Residents (Taylor Becker, Kathie Zhang, Alex Garza) along with a dedicated Education Leadership team, do a lot of heavy lifting to ensure our candidates get the most accurate picture of our program and the people who make it great. Special thanks as well to many of our faculty members who took time to meet with candidates who expressed a particular interest in work that aligns with your own.

But we should be clear, most of the work ensuring a successful Match Day goes on all year long. We work hard to keep our program always growing and supportive, to stand above our peer institutions in our commitment to innovation, while still meeting core needs. We provide our residents the ability to individualize their training to meet their long-term career goals, and we expose them to a broad array of experiences that shape them into physicians prepared for any challenge. We also work hard to make sure our program is accurately represented outside the institution, capitalizing on opportunities to plant our digital footprint in a variety of media, showcasing unique elements and our vibrant community at our best. We are also grateful to our alumni who spread the word of the greatness at Iowa both in their conversations with others and in the excellence that they display while at other institutions. Side note: our doors are always open to those graduates when they are ready to come back home.

Who will be those next Hawkeye ambassadors in training? We will soon update our map, but once again we have skimmed the cream off the top of some of the best medical schools in the country. They come from 23 programs in 17 states from all over the country, including 6 graduates of our own Carver College of Medicine, and 4 nations. We are especially pleased that an overwhelmingly majority—55 percent—are women. (As always, we are also interested to see just how many of our MD graduates choose internal medicine as a specialty. We believe this is a mark of the positive experiences they have in our clerkships and classrooms.) Our new class of interns include 34 physicians, counting the 9 preliminary trainees, 6 of which are Internal Medicine-Ophthalmology preliminary trainees. This total also includes 2 combined Medicine-Psychiatry residents.

We will share more information about this class soon and then introduce you to them all one by one this summer. For now, please join us in congratulating and welcoming our newest members!