School of Medicine Students Celebrate Match Day Complete With Specialty-Themed Cake

The Li family stands together with Karen Li who is holding her match envelope
Karen Li (M’25), second from left, and her family joined the Match Day celebration in the Leavey Center Ballroom. (Image: Heather Wilpone-Welborn)

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(March 28, 2025) — Graduating medical students anxiously filled the Leavey Center Ballroom on March 21 to learn where their journeys would take them next for residency training. The annual Match Day celebration is a tradition shared by medical students across the country, where they all find out the residency program they have “matched” with at the same time on the same day.

Norman Beauchamp speaks into a microphone at Match Day
Norman J. Beauchamp Jr., MD, MHS (Image: Georgetown University)

Surrounded by their friends, family and School of Medicine faculty, medical students picked up the envelopes that contained their match information and awaited their news as the noon hour approached.

“Everyone who has an envelope, please raise it in the air,” said Norman J. Beauchamp Jr., MD, MHS, executive vice president for health sciences and executive dean of the School of Medicine. “Now make sure to thank the people — who you probably just bonked raising that envelope — who helped you get to this moment.”

After a brief countdown, Beauchamp announced that the time had arrived for students to open their envelopes. Shouts of joy quickly followed.

Watch a Video Celebration of Match Day 2025

Taking the Time to Find the Right Fit

Karen Li (M’25) was in the Match Day crowd with her family and was excited to find out she matched with her first choice at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in her specialty, plastic surgery.

Medical students and faculty stand together holding signs and celebrating on Match Day
Karen Li (M’25), second from left, celebrated matching with her first choice at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital with classmates and faculty. (Image: Georgetown University)

“It’s a really competitive field, and I had no research and no connections, so I took a research year and worked very hard and was fortunate to have great mentors who helped me get to the point where I could match,” said Li.

After attending pastry school in Paris for two months, Li returned to Georgetown the night before Match Day. To celebrate the special occasion, she baked a cake to honor her specialty.

“The cake is meant to look like a free flap surgery, where tissue is removed from one part of the patient’s body and connected to another part,” she said. Her sister, Winnie Li (M’26), also baked her a cake to honor her accomplishments and to share with friends and family who joined the sisters for the festive weekend.

The Li sisters pose with their baked goods arrayed on a table behind them and the rest of their apartment in the background
The Li sisters with bake sale treats. (Image: quaraneat)

The two sisters, who both attend Georgetown School of Medicine and live together, also bake together in their small Arlington kitchen. They put their baking skills to use helping fundraise for charities in addition to making custom cakes for clients. The sisters have shared their culinary creations online and have even expanded into writing cookbooks.

“Our last cookbook was inspired by conversations with Dr. [Stephen] Baker, the program director for the department of plastic surgery, who talked about patients who weren’t able to chew after jaw surgery not having good food options,” said Karen. “We wanted to create healthy and delicious meal options that weren’t just soups, so we created recipes like a blended shepherd’s pie.”

“This is the epitome of helping patients for us,” said Winnie. “We love to cook and we see food as such a vehicle to happiness,” added Karen.

A cake consisting of four parts, each one designed to look like the different tissue layers of a free flap surgery procedure
Karen Li’s Match Day cake

“I also see a lot of similarities between baking and plastic surgery,” said Karen Li. “Both require great attention to detail and are very technical and precise. Plus waking up early to be in a kitchen or an operating room and surrounded by metal while wearing a white coat feels very similar in its intensity to me.”

A lovely layer cake decorated with pink, yellow and violet flowers and the words she's gonna be a plastic surgeon in frosting
Winnie Li’s Match Day cake

Winnie hopes to follow Karen into plastic surgery as her specialty. “It’s been a blessing to have an older sister guide me and set an example to follow,” said Winnie.

Many more baking and plastic surgery related conversations are sure to follow between the sisters as Karen starts her residency at Georgetown in just a few weeks and Winnie completes her final year of medical school.

“We do share a lot of mutual interests and we work well together, especially in the kitchen,” said Karen. “It’s so nice to be able to talk about something related to plastic surgery or the operating room, and Winne just understands what I’m saying without saying it, and vice versa.”

Heather Wilpone-Welborn
GUMC Communications

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