Match Day ‘poster girl’ ready for her medical match

For the past three years, Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine student Gretel Carmenate has been the faceless face of FIU’s Match Day Ceremony.

That’s Carmenate in the white coat with the red stethoscope wrapped around her neck, the cascading black hair, and the envelope tucked in the coat pocket on the poster that has been used every year since 2014 to announce the annual ceremony, a rite of passage for medical students nationwide.

“I’ve tried to tell people that it’s me, but they don’t believe me because it’s just my neck,” jokes Carmenate, who this year will be on Match Day stage with the graphic of herself projected on a large screen behind her; the real-life Carmenate will have the envelope in her hand not in her pocket, and inside will be her next stop in her journey in medicine.

Match Day is when soon-to-be med school grads learn where they will continue their medical training in the specialized field of their choice. The way it works is a bit complicated, and it’s a computer that matches graduating students nationwide with residency programs.

Students usually apply to and interview with several residency programs. Then both students and programs rank each other. Finally, the computer considers the programs the student wants and the students the program wants, and voilà — it spits out a match. This year’s match results will be announced March 18.

Gretel Carmenate, right, with her mom, sister, and dad reunited at a medical conference in Colombia last year.

Carmenate was an M2, a second year medical student when she posed for the Match Day poster photo, now she’s an M4, counting the days to graduation. The 26-year-old has applied to residency programs in internal medicine and hopes to be able to stay close to home – both of her top residency choices are here in South Florida.

My family is a big reason, plus I really like this community,” she says.

Carmenate moved to Miami from her native Cuba when she was 11 years old along with her older sister, a dentist, and her mom, a middle school science teacher.

Her parents divorced when she was a little girl, and her father, also a physician still lives in Cuba, but they stay in touch. Just last year, she met up with him at a medical conference in Colombia where he got a kick out of quizzing her “about medical stuff.”

“He was hoping I was going to be an OB/GYN like him, but he’s proud,” she says.

Carmenate’s father won’t be here for Match Day, but her mom and sister will be on hand for the big event; so will her faceless poster twin who has witnessed so many other FIU medical students pass before her, but this one will be different, and yet so familiar.