Scrubs and superpowers: MCG celebrates Match Day

Heroes and villains descended upon the baseball field at SRP Park for the Medical College of Georgia’s Match Day 2025. For the future of health care in Georgia and beyond, the soon-to-be graduates are all heroes in white coats.

MCG faculty and staff work each year to plan a special event to ensure the annual Match Day ceremony is memorable for the senior medical students receiving that much-anticipated envelope. It contains information about where they’ll spend the next chapter of training for residency. Family, friends and supporters filled the stands of the GreenJackets’ stadium to cheer on their loved ones as they opened their envelopes at noon, along with medical students across the country.

Match Day by the numbers

• 98% of MCG’s graduates have a residency position
• Students matched in 29 states in 30 specialties
• 24% of this year’s class will remain in Georgia for their first postgraduate year. 

“It is not uncommon for me to hear from residency program directors across the country that MCG students are some of the best clinically prepared they see,” said MCG Dean David Hess, MD. “That is a testament to the caliber of the faculty and staff here who teach and support them.

“It’s always special to be with our students to find out what the next steps in their journeys to becoming a physician will be and to celebrate this culmination of their years of hard work, dedication and perseverance,” Hess continued. “I know this class, like others before them, will carry on MCG’s nearly 200-year-old tradition of great doctors and great medicine.” 

Cody Greene and his friends Melinda McKew and Mia von Gal devised a plan early on in medical school when they, in their mid-30s, realized they were the oldest members of their class. They decided they would dress up as the Golden Girls when it was their turn for Match Day, no matter the theme. 

Greene, the oldest in the class at age 38, pursued medicine after serving in the U.S. Army as an officer. He’ll be heading to HCA Healthcare/TriStar in Nashville for Internal Medicine, while McKew and von Gal matched together for Family Medicine at Mountain AHEC in Hendersonville, North Carolina. 

Greene thinks absorbing the official news of his next step will take some time.

“I’ve been putting the wait out of my mind,” he said. “It honestly doesn’t feel like it’s been four years. I feel like I should be studying for a test or something. It doesn’t quite feel real yet.”

Hannah and Hunter Spivey, who met and married during their time at MCG, matched together in Memphis, earning spots in their chosen specialties of pediatrics and internal medicine.

“Infinite relief,” exhaled Hannah, just a month away from celebrating their first year of marriage. “Just to know and be able to plan and get excited for the future together.” 

Dressed as the evil Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, Queen Abure, MCG’s 2025 class president, was anything but a villain on the special day. She was able to further pump up the crowd and be the same source of camaraderie for her classmates that she’s been for the past four years.

“I love people, and I knew I wanted to challenge myself with something in leadership,” she said. “It’s been the thing I’m most proud of in med school. Just being there for people when you’re in the trenches as well, and being someone that they can lean on. Learning to really keep that humanistic side of medicine. You’re here to take care of people, and you’re here to be there for people. And I feel like I really learned that from this role.”

Abure’s parents and grandparents are Nigerian immigrants, and her older sister was the first member of her family to become a doctor in 2021. She’s looking forward to following in her footsteps and making a difference.

When it was time for the students to open their envelopes, shouts of joy and tears erupted from Abure and her extended family as she read that she matched with her top choice: the University of California San Francisco – and her red Queen of Hearts dress was a nod to her chosen profession.

“I’m going to UCSF for integrated vascular!” Abure exclaimed. “It’s very niche – I’m the only one in my class going into vascular. I knew I liked the OR and I wanted to do surgery, so my mentor told me to shadow different surgeries, and I loved vascular. You see patients forever, and there’s a large disparity with vascular disease. There’s a lot of breakdown to health care access, and that’s something I wanted to work with. The procedures are incredibly cool, you’re working all over the body, and I don’t think there’s any other field like it.”