Match Day 2025
ECU medical students celebrate residency Match Day
Across the nation, medical students learned Friday where they will spend the next several years completing their residencies, the postgraduate training program for recent medical school graduates to gain specialized knowledge and practical experience in a chosen field of medicine.
Jennifer Jernigan and her family smile for the camera after she learns she will complete her next years of residency at ECU Health. (Photo by Bobby Ampezzan)
At the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, the Class of 2025 celebrated in style.
Sixty-eight of the 69 students in the class matched. One student elected to do a research year in orthopedics before entering the match program. Fifty-two percent of the class will enter primary care residencies, with 42% staying in North Carolina and 20% matching at ECU Health Medical Center.
The class stood with their families, friends, classmates and faculty members as they tore open their envelopes to reveal the next stop in their medical school journeys. Prior to receiving their envelopes, each student had the opportunity to walk across the stage to a song of his or her choice and a personalized presentation slide shown on a projector screen.
“Match Day is always a special moment in a physician’s journey, and today is no exception,” said Dr. Michael Waldrum, dean of the medical school and CEO of ECU Health. “These students have dedicated themselves to the noble pursuit of caring for others and now have the opportunity to take all they’ve learned here at the Brody School of Medicine to improve the lives of countless patients they will serve in their careers. I could not be more proud of the Class of 2025 on this special day.”
A Full-Circle Journey
Jennifer Jernigan’s next job will take her back to the beginning. In July, Jernigan will begin seeing patients as part of her combined emergency medicine-internal medicine residency at ECU Health Medical Center. She was born there.
It’s such a short route for this Greenville native and a long way for an English major who aspired to be a teacher.
Oluwafemi Opelami hugs his wife and children after learning he matched at his first choice of residency at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. (Photo by Bobby Ampezzan)
“I’m so thrilled to have matched here at ECU Health. I can’t wait to keep serving the people of eastern North Carolina as an emergency medicine-internal medicine physician. And I am so grateful for the opportunity to continue my journey in the community I call home,” Jernigan said.
Jernigan, a 2009 graduate of South Central High School, remembers the day she approached her favorite teacher, William Pierce (Spanish) about writing her recommendation for the North Carolina Teaching Fellows scholarship. “You really want to be a teacher?” he asked her.
Her mom, who attended ECU as a nontraditional student and a young mother, and became a nurse in the same hospital, told her she had it inside her to major in pre-medicine and become a doctor. No, Jernigan thought, she was sure of her path.
“I was more interested in language, in journalism, teaching English to high schoolers, even speech language pathology.”
She took her first teaching class and a chill took hold; the mentors in her life were right. Teaching wasn’t the career for her. Scrambling, she took a job in a neurosurgeon’s office and discovered that patient histories, gathered through careful interviews, both narrative and forensic in nature, are used to corroborate or contrast lab and imaging results and deduce a diagnosis. Medicine is storytelling, backward.
“It united all the things I’d been looking for in a career,” Jernigan said.
For a couple of years, she focused on her post-baccalaureate coursework, obtained a master’s degree in physiology and then completed a MedServe fellowship — an AmeriCorps program that places fellows in key primary care services for community health work, including interventions that impact community health. Hers was in Henderson, the urban center of a county with a population just over 40,000. When it was finished, she applied to medical schools in North Carolina and got into none.
“I had gone through undergrad, post-bac, master’s, and here I was, a nontraditional student already who had tried once, and it didn’t work out. Wow!” she said. “I sat down and really, really thought about this. In order to make this happen, I’m going to have to go back to school. It’s so much work, but I’d gotten so far. And I honestly cannot imagine being happy doing anything else.”
When the good news finally arrived in the spring of 2021, it brought her resilience into focus. She would draw on it over four years of medical school.
“One of the things that really motivated me was, I’ve seen the obstacles to great care in rural places. I want to make a difference.
“The Brody School of Medicine is dedicated to improving the health of eastern North Carolina. It’s stuck by that over the years, and it shows. I think we really do all have this genuine desire to help people from underprivileged backgrounds. But if we didn’t before, Brody definitely instills it once you get here,” she said.
Jernigan’s journey has come full circle.
“When my patients ask me where I’m from and I say, ‘Greenville,’ they don’t believe me. ‘Yeah, but where are you really from?’ I’ll point — ‘2 West, or wherever they were delivering babies.’ Giving back to an area that’s given so much to me, I’m thrilled about that,” she said.
Compassionate Community Care
Oluwafemi Opelami grew up with his general practitioner physician father and teacher mother caring for the members of their community. Femi, those close to him call him, saw himself doing anything but following in his dad’s footsteps, but sometimes life has a way of coming back to its start.
Dr. Jason Higginson and student Pranaya Pakala celebrate onstage with a synchronized dance. (Photo by Steven Mantilla)
Concord University in West Virginia invited the soccer standout and native of Sagamu, Nigeria, to join the team. He graduated in 2001 with an accounting degree and moved to Charlotte, where he worked in a financial services building. On Sept. 11 that year, he and his fellow employees were forced to leave their offices, and in some cases their past lives behind.
“I was 21 when 9/11 happened. It affected the way the country hired people that weren’t from here, which was the reason why I moved away from financial analysis,” Opelami said.
His family lost his mother to a traffic accident shortly thereafter — another huge blow — which induced him to adjust course.
Opelami stayed in Charlotte and started his own telecommunications business that eventually employed 10 people, which was fun. He learned a lot. But there came a point when felt he needed some grounding.
“I ended up going home to Nigeria in 2011. I hadn’t been back since ’97 and I got to reconnect with my family,” he said. “When I came back to North Carolina, I talked to my wife. Medicine was something I always ran away from but felt like I could do more. I needed to do something that made an impact in people’s lives.”
Opelami started in compliance, the business end of medicine, but paperwork didn’t scratch his itch. He wanted more hands-on and trained to be an EMT and then a paramedic — a surreal experience, being nearly twice the age of the other students in his classes. Opelami believes that always having been older than his peers in his medical education has been to his advantage.
“I’ve worked in health care, I’ve raised children, been married. So my perspective on life and some of the causes of anxiety don’t dominate me; I can take a deep breath and put things in perspective,” he said. “At the end of the day, my family is OK, my wife is OK, and my kids are OK. Everything will just kind of fall in line. I love that I’m doing this with gray hair.”
Riding in an ambulance was fulfilling, but he needed more. In 2021, Opelami was accepted to the Brody School of Medicine. The exposure that he has already had while in Greenville, extending health care to communities in need, has set the trajectory of his professional future.
“I’ve had an opportunity to be part of the Greenville Community Shelter clinic. I was the co-director there. Health care becomes secondary when you don’t have a roof over your head, when you have a lot of financial insecurity,” he said. “Working with wonderful physicians who would give their time really opened my eyes; I feel like I will do that in the future.”
Working in the acute care setting of a hospital is great, Opelami said, and offered him perspective. While treating patients during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he got his first real experience with persistent medical conditions and the poor outcomes that result when individuals lack routine care.
“I want to be able to reach out to people within the community and educate them about those chronic illnesses — heart failure, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) — things that we can manage and educate them about. Rather than have them end up at the hospital, let’s try to manage patients’ illnesses and advocate for them,” Opelami said.
While emergency medicine gave him his first taste of impacting the lives of those in his community, community-based care is where he thinks he can make the most of his Brody education.
Opelami said it is obvious now that the role his father played as a healer who was invested in the outcome of every member of their community unconsciously colored his passion to help his future patients manage long-term health concerns.
“People are at the core of it. You need to be able to connect with people, which makes the process easier for you as a physician. Once you connect with someone, you gain their trust,” he said.
Opelami matched in internal medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, and the tears on his face, and those of his family, suggest he’s more than happy to have matched close to home, where he will have opportunities to live out the example his family set for him in Nigeria.
“Being a Black man in a white coat is an honor and a privilege. I am grateful for the role models who have paved the way for me — my father, brother and uncle,” Opelami said. “The Yoruba proverb Ènìyàn lașo mi resonates deeply with me. It translates to ‘People are my clothing.’ My village — my family, friends, mentors — has carried, encouraged, protected and inspired me every step of the way.”
Gratitude and guidance
Poised to take on the next chapter in her medical school journey, Pranaya Pakala stands ready with gratitude for all those who supported her over the years — from friends and family to faculty and fiancé.
Pakala, of Winterville, attended ECU as an undergraduate Brinkley-Lane Scholar and majored in molecular biology.
“I came to visit and saw the amount of opportunity I had, the amount of support I was seeing, the study abroad opportunities and how everyone was supportive of me becoming a doctor,” Pakala said. “It was really encouraging to see that the whole faculty was willing to help me get into medical school.”
Pakala matched in internal medicine at Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans.
“This was my number one choice!” Pakala said as she tearfully hugged her family. “I’ve been really nervous. This is kind of determining your entire life for the next three years, but also what your life is going to be like in the future. It’s nerve-racking trying to figure out where I’m going to be and the fact that all of it is going to change soon.”
Pakala’s fiancé, Dan Ta, graduated from the Brody School of Medicine in 2024 and is completing his residency in medicine-pediatrics at LSU Health in New Orleans. The two met early in medical school.
“I feel really great!” Ta said, taking in the moment.
Even with the nerves, Match Day is unofficially a more meaningful day for Brody School students than commencement in May.
“This is probably more exciting,” Pakala said. “There’s not as much suspense with graduation. With this, I’m counting down so that I know what the future is, and then I hope I can enjoy it too.”
For her walk across the stage, Pakala chose a popular Telugu song from a recent movie and choreographed a quick dance with Dr. Jason Higginson, Brody executive dean, to surprise her parents.
Like those she has nurtured with faculty, Pakala has formed friendships among her classmates that will survive their diverging paths.
“I’ve found some lifelong friends that I’ll never let go of,” she said.
Looking back on her medical school years, Pakala said her decision to specialize in internal medicine was based partly on the diverse and unique population in eastern North Carolina. As she eased into her clinical rotations and learned more about patients and their backgrounds, the doors of possibility opened.
“I am so thankful to the people who took me under their wing and tried to make sure I saw as many opportunities as possible,” she said. “I learned as many diseases as possible, because it’s common that a lot of patients tend to have three or four diseases at one time. So, it’s not just learning about how to treat one specific disease. All of this helped me realize the impact of the human factor and how scared patients are. Brody really helped me become more compassionate.”
Those efforts can help build a patient’s health care history and influence his or her treatment plan as well.
“We dig in to find out more of the story,” Pakala said. “Sometimes knowing that somebody’s in heart failure isn’t enough; it’s knowing that the reason they’re in heart failure is they weren’t able to afford their medications because they lost their job, losing their insurance and trying to figure out how to support their family and kids.”
Pakala said her mother was an inspiration for her to attend medical school and to foster that empathy, as she stayed by her mother’s side through health challenges.
“I’m trying to be as compassionate as possible to patients because I was on the family side of patient care,” she said, “so it’s become a full-circle moment.”
When she completed rotations in New Orleans, “everybody was pretty impressed with how well-rounded my knowledge was because of where I came from,” Pakala said.
Beyond embracing her relationships in the education realm and in patient spaces, Pakala has also discovered and created ways to support current and future students. She started the Peer Advising Program for Brody School students, a resource she hopes lasts for many years. The program provides peer advisors who lend support to fellow students during hard times or any time they need extra guidance.
Pakala is hopeful that students on both sides of the program benefit from the partnerships. Part of her efforts with the program was to pay forward the support she had during her first years of medical school.
“I’m really thankful they chose to invest in me,” she said, “that they stuck with me during the hard times as well. I was able to learn that things can still work out toward the end. I’m thankful that I’m a different person than I was when I came in.”
(photo by Steven Mantilla)