Match Day

While still alive they did divide
Their favorites from the throng,
Yet how to pick the worthy ones
When they were dead and gone?
'Twas Gryffindor who found the way,
He whipped me off his head
The founders put some brains in me
So I could choose instead!
Now slip me snug around your ears,
I've never yet been wrong,
I'll have alook inside your mind
And tell where you belong!"
—"Sorting Hat Song," JK Rowling

Last Friday I didn't write a post because it was Match Day. This Friday, I'm writing a post about Match Day.

Match Day is a sort of annual anti-holiday for people in the American medical school system. Each year on Match Day, medical students—just a few months shy of graduating into full-fledged doctors—gather together to find out whether their immediate futures will be great, terrible, or somewhere in between. On Match Day, they are placed by a sort of techno-dystopian version of the sorting hat into their various medical residency programs, which will last for the next three years of their life and which are required for all doctors entering the profession.

While the sorting hat in the Harry Potter universe gives students no say in whether they will be stuck in Hufflepuff for the duration of their time at Hogwarts, medical students do have an opportunity to influence the matching algorithm that automatically sorts them into their residency programs, insofar as they rank the programs they would like to go to. But medical students have just as little ability to change the sorting hat's mind after it's made its decision: all matches are final.

Match Day is also pretty public. In past years at Anna's school, the annual ritual has been that students are called onto the stage in small groups, where they receive envelopes with their placements and are encouraged to open them and read the results to an audience of hundreds (or thousands, counting the webcast audience). Someone once asked my fiancee why Match Day is done this way. "Because they do not care about students' mental health," she said.

Match Day at Anna's medical school this year started bright and early with an 8:30 session for students with medical school loans. I was present at this event, and it was fantastic, by which I mean tolerable. Much of the session was dedicated to helping students learn how to jump through loopholes in the federal government's student loan policy—loopholes designed expressly to help people entering much less lucrative fields, but which apparently medical students have been more than happy to find out about and take advantage of. As a bonus, there was also some very excellent whining from people worried about the Obama administration's plan to tighten some of these loopholes, which was pretty rich coming from people who will make well upwards of $100,000 a year for the duration of their careers.

With the taste of that in our mouths, Anna and I moved on to the auditorium where the Match ceremony was being held. In a saner universe, everyone might have been patiently waiting with their loved ones and chatting over refreshments, or leaving and going out for lunch and coming back at noon to get their envelopes (note: no one is allowed to know their match before noon—NO ONE—or the medical school may lose its right to participate in match). In our reality, however, students were partitioned off from their family and friends in a giant hall, and an announcer at the front stalled for almost an hour and a half by laboriously calling up each student, one at a time, to get their envelope. I kept myself sane by updating Facebook:

The bedpan full of money is supposed to compensate whoever gets called last.

I found out later that Anna was staying sane by sharing my updates with her fellow students on the other side of the partition. We are pretty cute, she and I.

After noon arrived—complete with, I kid you not, a New Year's Eve-style countdown—the students and their families rushed together across the partition and madly tore open their envelopes. Meanwhile, Anna and I left the auditorium to open our envelope somewhere calm and private. Happily, we got our first choice, the Ball Memorial Hospital program in Muncie, Indiana. We'd ranked it number one because (a) it's a great program, (b) it's next to a good place for me to go to grad school, and (c) it's near where my Dad's side of the family is from, so we'll have a support network already pretty well in place. We were very, very relieved and happy.

We pretty immediately packed our bags and hit the road for Muncie, on the prowl for a place to live. We found out some things and had a good time, but I'll save housing adventures for a future post.

On Being a Future Doctor's Future Spouse

Doctor, doctor give me the news,
I've got a bad case of lovin' you!
No pill's gonna cure my ill,
I've got a bad case of lovin' you!
—"Bad Case of Loving You," Robert Palmer

December was a harrowing month for me and my fiancée, Anna. We had the stresses of holiday travel and socializing to deal with, sure, but everyone has that. Layered on top of it though, like a thick frustration frosting on the cake of exhaustion, was Medical Residency Interview Season.

Let me start by saying that, however stressed I may have gotten during this time, it was much more difficult for my fiancée, which will become abundantly clear as soon as I start talking about it. (Forgive me, it's just that she reads this blog and I need to get out in front of whatever raised eyebrows may be coming my way if I imply that the burden was primarily mine. I love you, dear.)

Anyway, Anna is almost done with medical school, and that means it's time to find a residency program. To the uninitiated: residency means you're a doctor, but you're not cool enough yet to really do all the doctor stuff on your own, so you have to let other doctors be the boss of you until you're totally cool. Residents achieve total coolitude after three years. And those three years are pretty intense; you end up working on the order of 80 hours a week. On the plus side, you get paid, which is more than you can say for medical school!

Finding the right residency program means looking at the info for a ton of programs, picking ones that you like, asking nicely if you can get an interview at those programs, scheduling the interviews for the programs that are willing to have you, traveling to the programs you need to interview at, actually doing the interviews, meeting the residents and faculty, asking lots of questions so you sound interested and engaged, and then traveling home once you're done so you can get back to your school work the next day. It's just, super, super fun.

And that's just the beginning. It's what occupied Anna, and to a lesser extent me, throughout late November and most of December. We spent our weekends, and sometimes our weekdays, hauling ourselves all over Indiana and a little over Chicago. (Anna was the sole driver on these trips, as I cannot drive stick, and she has a manual-transmission automobile. So really, she hauled ourselves all over Indiana and a little over Chicago. But I digress.) Anna's job was interviewing, being charming, etc., while mine was to assess my willingness to live in the various places we visited and to not come off as a boob at the various dinners she and I attended with programs' residents. We met at said dinners our fair share of bros and lady-bros, but there were cool people, too. (Boom, bros! Boom. If you can't handle these sick burns, consider not being such a bro.)

So when we crawled back home after a month of that, and holiday travel to boot, we were relieved that the whole process was complete and we would never have to do anything else with regard to this matter again. Wrong-O! It was time for round two: the second looks! These are the more "fun" events that candidates like Anna are invited to come to, indicating that the program is interested in having them back to meet more people in the program and socialize with them and the faculty. "Fun" is in scare quotes because sometimes the "fun" is more theoretical than anything. What with all the bros. (BOOM.) But also, not all the activities are necessarily appealing,* and the additional travel and socialization weigh heavily—even when talking with people we like, we're introverts, so it takes its toll. But, it's a good opportunity to assess programs we're really interested in more thoroughly; not just the people, but also the locations they're situated in. So we picked our top three programs, and we've been going to those. Our last one is this weekend!

The next step will be ranking the programs. The way residency works is, all the candidates rank their programs, number one through however many they want to list, and all the programs rank the candidates who have applied. Then a computer sorts all the candidates into programs, in a way that favors the the candidates over the programs; if you rank a program at number one, you get it, unless it's already full (of candidates who also ranked it number one but were ranked higher than the program), and then you get your number two, unless it's already full, and so forth. If my explanation was confusing, then I'm sure you'll love the one on Wikipedia.

Successfully getting into a program is called "matching," and you find out which program you matched with on something called Match Day. In the case of Anna's school, it's a ceremony that seems designed for high potential for public humiliation: students and their friends and families are gathered into a large auditorium. The students are called up to the stage in small groups, handed envelopes with their matched programs, and encouraged to read the results into a microphone, regardless of whether the audience will hear joy or disappointment in their voice. The only saving grace is that those who haven't matched aren't invited at all, and so all are spared the possibility of opening an envelope with a rejection letter. Note, though, that all of this is also streamed live for the benefit of anyone with an internet connection.

I am not a huge fan of this process, but I am a huge fan of Anna and I respect and admire her choice of profession, so I am happy to be a part of deciding with her, with all that it entails. I'm especially excited for what will come when the process is done, and we can move on with our lives together.

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* We were invited to one second look event which included a "hipster themed" party, at which, I kid you not, doctors and future doctors were expected to attend "dressed like hipsters," whatever that means. I am inclined to read it as "Hey, current and future members of the upper middle class, come dress up as poor people for a laugh," but that may be uncharitable of me. At all events, we did not go to that one.