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!