Match Day for Jacksonville med students illuminates Florida’s gap in producing new doctors<\/a><\/p>\nBrennan May drowned in August 2020 preparing for Navy special forces training. He was 29. Bradley was found dead outside his home from a gunshot wound in May 2021. He was 22.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t get my brothers off my mind,\u201d May says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t always a super confident kid. I was shy. My confidence didn\u2019t match my competence for some reason; I don\u2019t know why.
\u201cBut they were two people that always believed in me. They saw this in me from the time I was 7 or 8 years old. They treated these things as a foregone conclusion from the time I was 10.<\/p>\n
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Will Brown<\/p>\n
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Jacksonville Today<\/p>\n
Ryan May is the middle son of Susan and Ronald May. Together they have endured the unexpected deaths of Ryan\u2019s brothers, Brennan in 2020 and Bradley in 2021. However, the family was all smiles on Friday, March 20, 2026, when Ryan learned he would serve a medical residency in Boston. <\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of my confidence is growing into the person I felt they saw me as.\u201d<\/p>\n
May is the middle child of Susan and Ronald May. Because his mother earned a doctorate in psychology, May jokes that he will become the second Dr. May in his family. This May, he will also become one of the few Black male doctors in the United States.<\/p>\n
An analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges found there were 542 Black men in medical school in 1978. In 2025, the association reported there were only 552 Black men in medical school.<\/p>\n
Dr. Abba Zubair is the dean of the Alix School of Medicine\u2019s Florida campus. He says May was a standout student.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is always there at the forefront, asking questions, making suggestions on how we can improve our service,\u201d Zubair says.<\/p>\n
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In this family photo from May 2019, Ryan May (center), stands with his family, from left, older brother Brennan, father Ronald, mother Susan and younger brother Bradley. Ryan’s brothers died in separate incidents in the weeks before he started medical school. <\/p>\n
The eight-person cohort will focus on internal medicine, general surgery, dermatology, psychiatry and pediatrics.<\/p>\n
May initially planned to become a trauma surgeon as a way of coping with Brennan and Bradley\u2019s deaths.<\/p>\n
He realized he had more to give. He considered ophthalmology, then changed his focus to otolaryngology.<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized that if I\u2019m just an interventionalist, I would be missing out on, I think, a lot of what I want out of my career,\u201d May says. \u201cAnd I wouldn\u2019t be able to give to people what I feel a lot of my personal strengths are, simply because the time of interaction is a little bit too short in that specific setting.\u201d<\/p>\n
May will spend the next five years as an ear, nose and throat resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School.<\/p>\n
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Will Brown<\/p>\n
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Jacksonville Today<\/p>\n
Graduates from the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in Jacksonville were part of a cohort of 96, including campuses in Arizona and Minnesota. They are, from left: Guido Chiriboga, Vivian Iloabuchi, Xindi Chen, Tristan Meier, Noah Lee, Alexandra Bechtle and Ryan May. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In medical circles, the third Friday in March means one thing: Match Day. That\u2019s the date when medical…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117],"class_list":["post-211312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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