Residency Process

So I thought I write today about the residency process of becoming a doctor since Zach is going through that now. This will be more or less tailored to what our plans are for the next year or two. The whole process begins officially in September of the year before you match. There is one consolidated website where you submit your application and then pick the schools you want to recieve it and they download it at their leisure. Zach applied to 55 Neurosur programs all over the country and 15 General Surgery programs as a back up. After submission of the application, then you sit around and wait for emails from the program saying that they want to interview you or saying "thanks but no thanks." The "no" emails are all the same "thank you for your interest in our program but due to the high volume of qualified candidates we cannot offer you an interview." blah! Anyway....once the interview requests come then you have to coordinate them with your schedule. The program usually offers 2 or 3 options for dates. Anywhere between 10-15 interviews is really good. Once all the interviewing is done (usually around January) then you rank your top hospitals based on the programs you liked, the area, things like that. And the programs rank their applicants. Zach will rank according to the area, the programs he liked and also rank according to which hospitals would allow for me to do my electives there next year. After all the ranking is done, a big complicated computer system jumbles everything up and "matches" applicants to students based on the numbers. On the 3rd Monday of March you get an email telling you if you matched or not and then on that Thursday you get an email saying where you matched.

Fingers crossed tightly, Zach matches into a Neurosurgery program in March and he will move there in May. I have to do Peds and OB/Gyn in NY next summer so I'll join him whereever he is next August and finish off my electives then apply to programs in the area that he is in. We won't be couples matching but hopefully I'll get into the same program that he is in because we have heard that programs take into consideration couples. Meaning, I would have an advantage in the interview process at the hospital where Zach is practicing since we are together. Since I have no idea what speciality I want to go into....I'll have to figure that out by next year at this time!

Not sure if this cleared anything up or not...but I know people have asked me questions about the process and in particular what Zach and my plans were.

On another note...only 3 more days of Internal Medicine!!!