...and in the Spring...

we got engaged...

...and married.

MATCHED!

We matched in Philadelphia, here for 3 more years! She was a little upset at our result, she was hoping to return to Chicago to be close to family, but after the initial shock she feels better and likes the fact that we don't have to move far.

Yes we are potentially moving to a new place, our very first "place." We started to look but a lot of things are still up in the air, like start date etc. We get our contracts and employment details in a couple of weeks.

Coming up is a 5 week vacation in Europe that we're looking forward to, well at least I am, she is a bit nervous. She hasn't traveled much recently but she does have travel experience. I think she's just nervous because it's new and it's not something she would have done (going away for 5 weeks). I think we can fit vacation, moving, etc before residency starts sometime in June though.

Graduation: May 17th!

I could not have done the things I did this year without God, who took my father to a better place and left me his money to fund my interviews and take this lovely vacation, who also put in place everything we needed to match well! He also allowed me to stay here to continue to volunteer at local clinic that I've worked at for the past 4 years.

The blog will continue, I'll try to remember to post. As usual, Flickr is where I keep my pictures.

update part 2...all about The Match

In the Fall of 2012, my girlfriend, who we'll call "N," and I began applying to residency programs. This meant that we needed at least 3 letters of recommendation (LOR) (some programs require 4). We get these on our clerkships in 4th year. The better we perform on these 4 week clerkships, the higher the likelihood that we would get great letters. I think in all, N and I were able to get pretty good letters. My letters were so good that my interviewers comment on them throughout the interview season (we don't get to read the letters ourselves so we don't know what's in them, it's a bit of a gamble). From what I heard from what's in my letters, I was able to learn how to properly embellish, it's an important skill, just in case I need to write letters in the future =)

In addition to letters, we need a personal statement. I think we were lucky here to have good people who read our PS and made great comments. I also had good comments from interviewers about my PS.

So far, the stars have aligned for our LOR and our PS!

Next we needed a curriculum vitae, or resume. This is a bit different than your non-academic resume, the CV highlights our academic or clinical medicine related achievements. Again I think we were pretty lucky here. My big thing on the CV were the long trend of working in underserved areas and the few projects I've done around them. Suffice it to say, I was able to make my CV look pretty impressive, even though yours truly may not be that impressive =). N on the other hand is a smart cookie in school she got elected into Alpha Omega Alpha, an honor society. The school elects the top 10% for AOA. It's something you can put on your CV and people would know how well you did in medical school. So that's pretty impressive. She also had a few other things to write about that made her CV as impressive as she is!

LOR, check, PS, check, CV, check!

Next to select programs. Here's the tricky part. Oh I forgot to mention, I'm applying for a residency spot in Family Medicine, yep primary care. And N is going for pediatrics (if you saw here you'd think peds too, not only for the fact that she's about the size of a small child, but her whole persona oozes kid love). Anyway, these aren't very competitive fields, the least competitive in fact. Then, how to choose which programs to apply to. People generally apply based on a couple strategies: location, reputation, shotgun the nation. We went with the last, although looking back on it now, we should have just applied more strategically.

As you can imagine, you apply, you get interviews (generally), you travel and go to these interviews and the costs add up. Plane tickets, rental cars, hotel in addition to the application fee! We went on about 20 interviews total. I didn't have the patience and wherewithal to go to anymore (we applied to about 30 and got offered about 30 interviews). We interviewed starting in October/November, then spent the whole month of December traveling, and January. It's always interesting to interview and talk about yourself for a day, but it's also exhausting. We probably spent about $5000-6000 between the two of us.

And there were other costly "glitches." In a laundromat in San Francisco, I forgot myself and left my nice new expensive laptop unattended for a moment and it was stolen! Did not get it back or have heard back from the cops yet and that was back in December. The second glitch was near Christmas, I was driving N to the airport early in the morning after a day of driving from San Fran to Southern California. We were talking about residencies and I wasn't paying attention, we were on a big 8 lane highway and it was empty and my speed got up there and I got a $500 speeding ticket! Yikes.

The tally so far:

• Stars aligning x3
• "Glitches" x2

Anyway, back to the topic. It's now March and we finished our rank list. Let me take a moment to explain this complex process. The Match works like this. You interview at your programs, lets say 4 programs each for me and N. If you were to do this individually, you would simply rank the programs you interviewed at in order of preference. The residency programs also have their own rank list. A ranking program then takes both list from every program and every applicant and tries to "match" everyone based on their highest preferences. So it would be to our advantage as applicants to rank the "dream" programs up high because it doesn't really hurt us. Another way of saying it is that we don't have to consider that we may not be good enough for a particular program, because the Match system takes that out of the equation and continually tries to put you, the applicant, in the highest position possible on your list. The guy who designed the algorithm won the Nobel for economics recently, he also designs the ranking system for school systems.

But N and I are couples matching, which means all of my choices are linked to her choices. Her number 1 is linked to my number 1 and so on. Both of us would have to "match" at each program to get our number 1 choice. It wouldn't make sense for me to link a Philly program and for her to link a New York program, we'd be 2 hours apart! This involves a lot of compromise as you can imaging, I won't go into that here.

What's our list like. N is from Chicago, her family is there, her adolescent siblings are there and we would love it to watch them grow up, it's a once in a lifetime thing that we won't ever get to experience again until we have our own kids. So 2 programs in Chicago, then we go to New York City. Our 4th and 5th choice is Philadelphia, we both have 2 programs here. And then the list goes on and on. But hopefully we don't have to go past Philadelphia. 

We submitted our rank list February 20th. We find out at noon EST on Monday, March 11th if we even matched. If we don't match, that means that we have to spend the week trying to find open positions in the country to get into. This may mean I may not be a family physician depending on what's available out there or that we could be far apart from each other. Obviously the competitive specialties aren't going to have open positions after the match. If we do match, then we sit back until around noon on Friday March 15th for the official envelope that contains our match location. That's it, you're all up to date! We're waiting as of this moment, nothing else to do but wait!

18 month update part 1

It's been sometime since my last update. Last time I wrote about finishing Step 1 (of 3). That was Summer of 2011. After that I went to France and Italy for 2 weeks before 3rd year, my clinical years, began. The clinical years are different from the first 2 years. Instead of being stuck in a classroom all day and learning about the foundations of medicine, medical students are thrusted into the high paced wards of hospitals, the freeze of operating rooms (temperature and temperaments), and many other environments where we have to deal with patients, nurses, and doctors.

This is where we transition from thinking like a student to thinking like a doctor, while striving for top grades in both standardized multiple choice exams and the subjective impressions of our attendings and residents. I had a tough time of it, although I was always a fast learner, there were many things to adjust to and I had trouble sorting it all out. Every rotation was different and new and something I'd never seen before. The learning curve was steep, but I eventually got over the hump.

At the end of the Spring of 2012, I went and took Step 2 of my board exam. I scored well. And I started my 4th year with much more confidence and with a renewed sense of purpose and enjoyment in finally getting the hang of medicine, at least at my level. There is still much to learn, in the words of my attending who said "after 35 years of practicing medicine, I feel like everything is finally clicking together."

I lost my father in the Spring of 2012, April 6th. He had another stroke, he bled into his brain. We withdrew his care, meaning he would only get medication for pain control. I slept and sat in his hospital room and watched him for a week. He was like in a coma, so we couldn't talk to him, though my family thought he could listen. It was hard to watch him for a week, it makes you doubt. I still think about it now. I felt empty after he passed. It's been a few months now, and I think I'm back to my normal happy self.

I also got a girlfriend in 2011. I successfully wooed a classmate, I don't think she knew what she was getting into =). We have been together now for almost 2 years. I love her very much and she says she loves me too. She helped me become well again after my father passed. It's too bad they have never met. We decided to couples match, meaning our residency ranking will be coupled so that we could stay together in the same city during residency, more later.

boards are DONE!

I took my USMLE Step 1 exam last saturday after 5 weeks of pure intense crazy studying that sometimes wasn't so intense, just crazy. I am very relieved I don't have to open my USMLE first aid anymore, hopefully. The key to the Step 1 is to not just pass, but also to pass with at least a decent score. If, for instance you get a barely passing score, you will have trouble getting residency spots because of the emphasis that residency sites place on Step 1, and to a lesser extent, Step 2 scores. Oh and if you pass, you cannot retake the exam for a higher score for 7 years! You're stuck with whatever passing score you get. This can be very traumatic to people's careers!

So what's a decent score?

The highlighted ones are the specialties I'm considering going into. You can see the average scores and the standard deviation of scores for each specialty. It would make my life easier to have a higher score because not all residency sites are created equal. Some are better than others. But I still believe it is what you make of it and for speaking for myself, I'm happy if I get an average score for those specialties I'm looking to go into.

So what was the test like? You go to a standardized testing site and sit down in a cubicle in front of a computer. You have to be checked in, finger printed, made sure that nothing is in your pockets or written on your skin somewhere every time you step away from your computer to take a break. No strip search though! You do hour long blocks of 46 questions each. You have to do 7 of these blocks and you're given 45 minutes of break time thru out the entire day and you manage it on your own.

I had enough energy to last me through the day and I didn't feel exhausted at the end. It was very nerve wracking at first to think how significant this day will be for my future. Once that passed, though, I got into the groove of working through the questions. I don't want to pretend to know how I did. I will find out in 4 weeks and for now, I'm blissfully ignorant!

What's next? I'm going to France and Italy for 2 weeks. I'll be visiting the French Riviera, Cinque Terre and Florence before heading north to Paris for a week. It's been a very strange and I guess rewarding 2 years. I think patience is the most important lesson I've learned these past 2 years. I learned how to be patient with life and with family and with myself. I learned the value of slowing down and stopping for a while just to enjoy the moment. I'm looking forward to more lessons to learn. Done with year 2. I've got 2 to go.

Gotta pack

Pictures coming!

Moved my photos....

...to flickr, see her: flickr

Months end update

My aunt may need surgery to close the PFO, she's been having chest pains and it sounds a little like unstable angina. But I don't really know her case. I'm praying for her.

My dad's endoscopy and colonoscopy is this Thursday, it's going to be a tough week of waiting.

I have an exam tomorrow so I'll keep it short. I miss my family, but I got some of them on Kik messenger so we can text chat across continents and oceans! Very happy about that!