Med school couple makes second match in residency

Their relationship was a match made in medical school.

What they didn’t know was that it would lead to another match, one long-awaited by fourth-year medical students and graduates across the world.

Jeff Shuler, 27, and Bri Herriott, 26, from Kansas City and Lee’s Summit, respectively, met in their first year in MU’s School of Medicine. By the beginning of their fourth year, they were engaged. Not long after, they were applying together for pediatric residency programs.

At Friday’s Match Day ceremony, in which fourthyear medical students from MU and their families found out which residency programs chose them, Shuler and Herriott discovered that they’ll be together professionally for three more years at their top-choice pediatric program, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

“We didn’t know it would happen, but it did, and we’re very excited,” Shuler said.

Match Day took place in a wall-to-wall crowded Acuff Gallery. At 11 a.m., students opened envelopes that revealed where they’ll continue their next phase of medical training. The event occurred at medical schools across the country, according to a news release from the National Resident Matching Program.

The class of 2018 comprises 98 students, according to MU Health Care spokesperson Jen Coffman. Ninety-six of them received a match Friday. Twenty-seven percent of the class will remain at MU, 39 percent will remain in Missouri, and 41 percent—including Shuler and Herriott—will join residency programs in highneed primary care fields such as internal medicine, family medicine and pediatrics.