Dean's Update
March 21, 2025 - Aron Sousa, MD
Friends,
Match Day
This spring we close out a remarkable era at the College of Human Medicine – Jerry Kooiman is retiring April 30. I cannot overstate Jerry’s importance to the college since he joined us in 2007. Last year, Jerry earned the Simmons Chivukula Award for Academic Leadership for his impact on the college and our communities. The article I linked above is an excellent summary of his work and demonstrates his thoughtful and humble attitude toward his remarkable contributions to the college and our communities. From my vantage point, the college’s culture is based on its embrace of the communities we serve, and Jerry and his work is at the core of that culture. When I met Jerry, he had traded his legislative gavel for a hammer, as he set out to assemble furniture for the second-year students starting in our new Grand Rapids expansion. In the years since, Jerry’s partnership and collegial approach to the college and its community work are manifest in so many accomplishments including our “new” campuses of Traverse City, Midland, Southeast Michigan, and Detroit. I have a surfeit of examples: the success of the Grand Rapids and Flint expansions, the Your Health Lecture Series, the Indigenous Pathway program, the Grand Rapids Innovation Park, and the MIDOCs (Michigan Doctors Improving Access to Care) program.
Linger with me for a while on the MIDOCs program. Jerry convened a group of government relations colleagues from other medical schools in the state, and they approached the legislature with a proposal for supporting residency programs in underserved communities in Michigan. With state and Medicaid support, the College of Human Medicine and medical schools of Central Michigan, Western Michigan, and Wayne State Universities now have 30 MIDOCs residency positions in underserved communities. For us, these residency slots are psychiatry positions in Marquette (from MSU Lansing) and Traverse City (from Pine Rest), family medicine in Alpena (from Midland), general surgery with Corewell Health in Newaygo, Montcalm, and Barry counties, and with the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians Health Clinic in Petoskey (from McLaren-Flint). For me, MIDOCs encompasses Jerry’s skills, effectiveness, and values. He and the team worked with these communities and with the state to create educational opportunities that are attracting physicians to communities of need. Just look where the MIDOCs residents are practicing. It is a mitzvah if ever there was one.
This week, I visited a group of our incoming chairs for the new departments we have created with Henry Ford Health. We spent a lot of time talking about the federal administration sowing academic lands with salt. And, given our mutual concerns about Medicaid cuts, we talked about budget. But more happily and more to my point, twice during my perambulations, recent college graduates stopped me in the hallway to talk. They were so happy and pleased with their education at the college and their residency match. Callooh! Callay!
This is Match Day. Today at noon, across this beautiful land, graduating medical students find out where they will do their residency for the next one to seven years. It is the big day for students and for medical schools, too. While the college does not know at the beginning of Match Week where people will be going, we do find out on Monday which students have matched and which need to enter the supplemental matches that occur during the week. It’s been a great year. Congratulations to our students on their excellent work and performance, and my deep thanks to our faculty and staff who help our students through weirdness and stress of the Match process. Our Match rate at the beginning of the week was 96%, which is excellent, and, as students went to lunch today, 99.5% of our students have a match and everyone has a plan for next year. O frabjous day!
Serving the people with you,
Aron
Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine