‘Match Day’ Jitters : Medicine: At annual UCI ceremony, medical students learn where they’ll intern. For some, their internships will take them across the country. Others, to their relief, will remain here.

Nearly 30 years ago, in a mostly black neighborhood of San Diego, a doctor inspired a little girl to learn the art of healing by curing her life-threatening tumor.

Much time passed, but the girl never forgot her dream of becoming a doctor herself.

And on Wednesday, Wanda Wilburn, now almost 40, joined her UCI College of Medicine classmates in the annual “Match Day” ceremony, where students learn where they will begin their medical careers when they graduate in June.

“I’m so very, very happy. It’s been a lot of mountains,” Wilburn said, hugging her friends and jumping for joy as she learned she will intern at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

Eighty-nine students quietly held hands with friends and relatives in the sunny quadrangle in front of Irvine Hall, taking a deep breath as they waited for their turn to approach the lectern and receive an envelope holding their fate.

“The closer we get, the more nervous I am,” said Mary Anne Fuchs, 27. “You don’t know whether you’re going to be near your family, friends and significant others.”

To lighten the mood, administrators asked each student to throw a dollar bill in a doctor’s bag, as a consolation prize for the tortured wreck who is called last.

Every year, graduating medical students choose their specialties and the teaching hospitals where they want to train, and then hope for the best as the hospitals choose students for internships.

All medical students throughout the nation received their envelopes at noon Wednesday in similar ceremonies that for many are more important than graduation because their intern assignments determine the course of their careers, said UCI Associate Dean of Student Affairs Deborah Stewart.

Students spend one to five years as interns and residents at their assigned hospitals, and a large percentage practice in the community where they are trained, she said.

Susan Munden, 33, screamed and sprayed her friends with champagne after she peeked in her envelope and saw “University of California, Irvine” printed in black and white.

“My husband doesn’t have to find a new job, and my kids don’t have to move,” Munden said ecstatically.

Classmate Kris Tewari, 29, also flashed a relieved smile when he realized he would train as an obstetrician-gynecologist at Irvine.

“I’ve been thinking about this for 365 days straight,” he said. “Second to when I proposed to my girlfriend, this is the most stressful thing.”

His mother, Sujata Tewari, a psychiatry professor at UC Irvine, said she “went blank” when her son’s name was called and the fateful moment arrived.

“He has been wanting it so much. It’s all we’ve been talking about at the house,” she said.

Nearly half of the 89 students in this year’s graduating class specialized in primary-care medicine. That number is much greater than the national average, which was 12.9% last year, Stewart said.

Primary-care doctors practice internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, and in California, obstetrics, and are short in number compared to colleagues in higher-paying specialties, she said.

Part of the trend in medical education is to encourage more students to enter primary care, she said.

Wilburn said she decided to become an obstetrician-gynecologist after working 12 years as a physician’s assistant in Los Angeles. She is looking forward to working at Emory University and serving a “large inner-city population,” she said.

“I felt,” she added, “that there was a need for female (doctors) in that particular area, (and) I felt I could relate to those patients.”