Inside Kevin Carolina's Match Day Experience

Surrounded by family, friends, mentors, and hundreds of fellow classmates, fourth-year Sidney Kimmel Medical College student Kevin Carolina learned where he would complete his residency training after graduation.

He opened the envelope, revealing his match: University of Maryland Medical Center’s internal medicine residency in Baltimore.

At the annual Match Day tradition at Jefferson, which was held on Friday, March 20, "tears of joy," hugs, and smiles are a familiar and expected sight. Carolina and his family were no different. 

“Seeing my dad cry, that’s how I know it’s something,” Carolina told the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

“That’s where God wants you,” his mother, Dorothy, said to him.

Upon learning in high school that fewer Black men were entering medical school in the mid-2010s than in the 1970s, Carolina's dream of becoming a doctor was born. Now he's one step closer to becoming the doctor he felt he had “been called to be.”