Dr. Jeff Cardon, MD

As a prior unmatched medical school graduate, I am providing tools to others to make their unmatched time as productive as possible.

This website refllects the views of the creator, not necessarily the University of Utah

Bio

On Monday, March 14, 2022 at 6:58 AM, I received some of the worst news of my life: I did not match into any residency position. I spent every waking hour during SOAP week writing and researching, panicking and soul searching. Despite sending out 45 applications to general surgery spots, I didn't get a single phone call, email, or interview. I was dead in the water.

My wife furiously researched what an unmatched medical graduate could do and found that Utah had a law that allowed the unmatched to work in patient care as an Associate Physician. What a miracle! We now had a way that I could improve my application for next match cycle. Then we found out the real problem: no one in Utah knew about this law. We called DOPL and emailed and tried to find out how many of these licenses had been granted, but they wouldn't give us any information.

Well, we have this wonderful to solution to this problem, with no way to use it, great. Within a few weeks we saw a job posting from Dr. Mary Tipton who was hiring two Associate Physicians. Amazing, another miracle! Well, she got over 1,000 applications for her two AP positions, and two other prior residents got the jobs. Despite my dissapointment, she and I have become good friends and colleagues in the push to make the Associate Physician Law common place throughout the State of Utah.

Dr. Tipton and I have been working together with Representative Stewart Barlow MD, DOPL, and the medical boards to improve this law and the licensing process. We hope that this website and our resources help the unmatched and physicians as we embrace this alternate pathway.

The rest of my story

After the SOAP

I worked closely with Student Affairs at the University of Utah and another miracle occurred, they found a way for me to delay graduation through the summer, allowing me to take 4 more Family Medicine courses. I did 2 sub-internships, 1 rural rotation, and 1 care of refugees rotation. This gave me 3 letters of recommendation, an Honors grade, commitment to the specialty and rural experience which opened up a lot of doors.

I only had 2 interviews last year, which were basically token interviews from the programs where I had done my orthopaedic surgery sub-internships. This year, since I pivoted to Family Medicine, I had so many interviews I actually had to decline invitations.

The good news is that I matched this year into Family Medicine.