By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content Director

For a few years after she matched into her residency program, my wife and I would watch streamed versions of her medical school’s latest Match Day celebrations.

After a while, we didn’t know anybody who was opening the envelopes and reading the results to their classmates. It was just fun to see the widened eyes that soon began to leak and the full-throated screams that emanated from the new doctors who had just received some of the best news of their lives in front of some of their closest friends. It’s always enlightening to watch other people (and perhaps future colleagues) experience so much joy after such a long and intense medical school journey.

Of course, there are always fourth-year medical students who end up disappointed by what lurks inside the envelope, but even watching those range of emotions play out in real time in front of a couple hundred people was an interesting exercise.

I don’t watch those Match Day celebrations in full anymore, and I was the one who reminded my wife a few days ago that Match Day had arrived. But the joy around the country is still palpable when that day in late March appears on the calendar.

For the past three years, I’ve put together the best Match Day reactions I could find on the internet (here’s the 2024 version, the 2023 version, and the 2022 version), because it’s fun to watch other people have fun and to celebrate their successes from afar. I’m doing it again for 2025.

Like most years, most people who posted their Match results on social media were in a celebratory mood. They either matched at one of their top choices or they had successfully navigated the process with their significant other. Others shared their disappointment. Still others reflected on their complex journeys.

Here were some of the best social media posts I found from this year’s Match Day celebrations (and if you're only looking at this in your email inbox, you're going to need to click on one of the above links so you can fully experience the tweets and videos in your browser).

 

The Best Match Day Reactions of 2025

First, the joy.

It’s got to be pleasurable to have a successful Match Day with others and get to eat cake while singing, “Happy Match Day to you.”

But you’d better have a box of tissues handy.

It wasn’t just tears, though. There was plenty of screaming and hollering.

 

Some even dressed up in costumes and headed over to the ballpark to celebrate.

 

Even Taylor Swift (and the joy she brings) made an appearance on social media.

 

As always, though, not everybody matched, and they had to be reminded that life could still be beautiful in the future.

 

And, of course, some matched somewhere other than their first choice.

match day reddit

 

But the point of the day is to figure out where the next step of your medical journey will take you. And for that, all of it should be celebrated.

 

Money Song of the Week

We talk so often at WCI about spending money and how to do so effectively (and to make sure you’re spending extravagantly on what you care about while being frugal on the things you don’t). But sometimes we forget that, for much of our lives, we’re lucky enough to spend on what we want AND what we need and that there are plenty of people in this world (probably the vast majority of the world) who don’t get to spend on what they want because they only have enough for what they need.

That’s basically what the RX Bandits’ 2001 tune, Get, is all about. As lead singer/guitarist Matt Embree repeats over and over again,

“No time to get what you wanted/It's time to get what you need/No time to get what you wanted, baby/It's so hard, it's so hard to see.”

In the song, he highlights a couple of examples of how people who don’t have enough money to dream about what they want are living their lives, including “the girl at the corner store” who thinks she’ll be complete if she has more money and the man with the drug problem who needs “more money for just one more hit, or at least one more bullet.”

This song is upbeat, filled with bright vocals, a jingly-jangly guitar, and the ska-punk horns that were once one of the defining traits of the band in its early days (it eventually became more of a prog band with a hint of jammy math rock and straight-ahead punk), but yeah, the tune’s subject matter gets a little dark.

I saw RX Bandits live a few days ago for the first time. Tickets were priced in the $50 range, but I scored one on a third-party site for $7. That’s the lowest price I’ve paid for a concert ticket since 2006 when I saw ska heroes Mustard Plug for $8 at a small bar/club in Cincinnati (yeah, I keep track of the prices I’ve paid for shows—I KNEW that info would come in handy some day).

Turns out that sometimes you can spend money on what you need AND what you want and still pay an extremely low price if you know where to look.

More information here:

Every Money Song Every Published

 

Reddit of the Week

Felt like this belonged here
byu/Jolly_Brick_3470 inBogleheads

Maybe you knew this. Maybe you didn’t. Or maybe you just want to weigh in on Roman number semantics as so many of the comments to this post did. But this couldn’t have been an accident (looking at you IVOO and VIOO).

What do you remember about your own Match Day experience? Would you have done anything differently?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]