It has already been a week since Match Day 2024 and we are still celebrating our success and this full class of interns who will join us in late June. As our Vice Chair for Education Dr. Manish Suneja and I said last week, we are exceedingly proud of the work that went into this year’s match and its achievements. Reviewing applications, interviewing, and then ranking just a fraction from hundreds and hundreds of medical students is a complicated, lengthy process. Every year there is an element of uncertainty about how it will go, no matter how many times our team does this. And every year, they pull it off. Well done! We have updated our map showing where our residents trained, but my other favorite new tradition is the Chief Residents’ video, produced by Cory Sheets and his video team in our Design Center. For the last few years, each class of Chiefs imagines a clever spoof as a way of welcoming the new class. This year’s Scooby-Doo-themed “mystery” featured some impressive wigs and a very well-trained German shepherd! Hats off to these annual expressions of excitement and creativity that show the world just how much we value education and our residents.

The importance we place on training comes through in these fun videos but more important it comes through on our residency’s website. An interested medical student can get a very good sense of what their training will be like just from spending a half-hour clicking through these well-organized pages. They can find a half-dozen detailed answers to a simple question—Why Iowa?—or they can dive more deeply into how they can become a better medical educator or how to grow as a scientist. The reason why we have so much to say on these pages is because of the leadership of our Education Team. They never stop looking for ways to improve what and how they teach, but they also encourage our younger clinician-educators to develop their own ideas, so that when they become the next to lead, the cycle of growth and innovation does not end. This is how our program makes room for things like the Transition to Residency, an elective initiative led by Dr. Matt Soltys, which will begin its sophomore run next week with a class of 18 graduating medical students about to become internal medicine interns. You can read about last year’s pilot and see photos of some of the hands-on training Dr. Soltys and other faculty offer in this “IntMed internship boot camp.”

One of the major challenges of recruitment—whether it’s for residency, fellowships, faculty, or even administrative positions—is that the University of Iowa probably does not factor regularly as someone’s first choice when they think about academic medical centers. Of course, anyone who has spent any time here knows that relative to our size, and even because of our size, we offer opportunities that can be found almost nowhere else. All we have to do is get the chance to tell them our story. We do that a lot already, but we can do more and we can do it in more targeted ways with more of us describing Iowa’s unique virtues. Our excellence shines in our clinical care and our excellence shines at research conferences, but I think we are missing chances to talk about how that excellence took shape. What makes Iowa unique is the ability to collaborate within and across disciplines and that our culture welcomes the ideas of anyone, regardless of rank or identity, as ideas worth hearing out, considering, and testing. I talked about our culture of collaboration last year and pointed to some specific examples. These are the kinds of stories that bolster the data like Blue Ridge rankings or our total publications in high-impact journals. This culture may just feel like the water we all swim in every day, but I can assure you that Iowa’s open and welcoming spirit is not common. I hope that you do not take it for granted and that you talk about it every chance you get.

One final note on our commitment to education, particularly our work with the medical students. Once again, the overwhelming majority of Iowa M4s seeking a career in primary care chose internal medicine as their specialty. There are many factors for this, to be sure, but the instructors these students encounter must be considered a primary impact. The experiences they have in our classrooms and in the wards, during their clerkships and while shadowing our residents and fellows, must be persuasive and exemplary. Thanks to each of you who have spent time with these graduates to have had such a positive influence in shaping their future career decisions. You have been with them every step of their journey. Some of you were on that journey even before they arrived by serving on the college’s admission committee. Special thanks to Drs. William Zeitler, Yolanda Villalvazo, and Samantha Solimeo. In this last cycle, they spent, respectively, 97 hours, 93.5 hours, and 82.5 hours in direct committee work, including meetings and reviewing applications. Thank you for this inspiring dedication that pays such dividends.