Matchmaker, matchmaker, find me a match

For those of you who don’t identify with the title of this editorial, it is from the lyrics of a song in the 1964 Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof”, which was adapted into a successful motion picture in 1971.(1) You may wonder what a story about Russian peasants in the late 19th century has to do with medical physics today. When I was asked to write an editorial about the 2015 MedPhys Match (MPM),(2) that line came to mind almost immediately. One of the main threads in the story is about finding suitable spouses for the main character’s three daughters. At that time, it was common practice in some cultures to employ the assistance of a matchmaker to find a suitable spousal match. Taking into account preferences of all eligible parties, the matchmaker would propose spousal matches. Although one can argue that such an important decision should not be left to an outside party, current divorce rates and the success of online matchmaking services could be viewed as evidence to the contrary. Many articles about algorithms to solve this type of problem refer to it as the stable marriage problem.(3) In my years as a medical physicist, I’ve witnessed many changes in the medical physics education and training landscape. The need for medical physicists has created a very rewarding (in many ways) profession, and as a result, competition to get into training programs and positions is intense. The American Board of Radiology (ABR) now requires medical physicist students to have CAMPEP-accredited residency training to complete their board certification process. With the transition to this new requirement, there was a noticeable “flood” of candidates getting into the board certification process before the new requirements took hold. I’m not going to debate the merits of the current landscape, but wanted to note that it is now here, and we have to deal with it. Sapareto and et al.(4) debated the merits of using a matching program for medical physics residency recruitment earlier in 2014 (before the MPM came into being). References in that article provide a history of how matching programs came into existence, and it is fairly obvious that there are several parallels between medical residency training recruitment (many years ago) and the current situation with medical physics residency training. As pointed out in the article, there were a variety of problems with the state of medical physics residency recruiting prior the MPM being put into place. There was an attempt at having a gentleman’s agreement* between programs to provide a fair playing field for recruiting. I could give many anecdotal examples showing “bad behavior”, but as pointed out in the article, there wasn’t anyone who was willing to provide any penalty for not following the agreement. The article suggests that an organization like CAMPEP could discipline programs that don’t follow the agreement, but this is not within CAMPEP’s mission.(5) Through the efforts of too many people to name, we were able to implement the MPM to create a better recruiting environment for the 2015 recruiting season, and participation in the program is much better than we had hoped. As of late October 2014, we have more than 70 programs participating in the MPM, and more than 140 applicants have registered. The program looks like it will be a success in its first year. In some ways, program directors went out on a limb when signing up this year and I would like to thank all of them for their faith in the system. I would like to use the rest of this editorial to deal with a few nagging questions that some might have regarding how the MPM works and whether it is really better than what we had before. First and foremost, I think that program directors and applicants worry about not being