Checking the emails... all the emails...

I check my email 20+ times a day these days. Looking out for those INVITATION TO INTERVIEW offers that have been trickling in steadily since mid-September.

Medical school is ridiculous. After you've worked incredibly hard for three years, you enter a new phase called APPLYING TO RESIDENCY. It is scary process, because if you don't play the game right, you could be without a residency spot (i.e. paying job) at the end of the year.

That sounds more ominous than it is, really. The majority of US grads obtain spots, but a much larger percentage of international medical graduates don't match.

The "match" is what makes this process so scary, albeit exciting. By applying the standard way that the majority of students apply, I have entered into a contractual agreement with most programs: that is, following a submission of my rank list which sorts the programs by preference from first to last, I am contractually obligated to go wherever the match puts me. At the end of the day, a giant computer mastermind looks at my rank list and compares it to where I sit on the program's rank list (e.g., I really want to go to Yale and rank it highly, but Yale doesn't like me and ranks me low), and then it sorts people so that the maximum number of positions are filled with the most desirable candidates. Wherever you match is where you go; there is no way around it.

To put this in some context, the majority of highly competitive applicants will match to their top choice school. The less competitive applicants aim for matching somewhere in their top five choices. The students who don't interview at enough places or don't rank enough programs run the risk of not matching at all, which means they can't start residency.

I've played it safe. I applied to a wide variety of competitive and less competitive programs, and thankfully, I've already heard from quite a few programs with interview offers. Interestingly, I was expecting to hear back from lots of Chicago programs. The opposite has really happened. I've heard from programs everywhere BUT the Chicago area!

This is a super exciting time for me. I am traveling everywhere from Oakland, CA to New Brunswick, NJ. I'm going to spend a lot more money than I would like. But at the end of it, we'll be moving someplace new and exciting, and I can't wait :). How often does life present you with this kind of opportunity? Where you are required to up and leave?

I plan on making posts of each place I visit, to keep track of what I like about the cities I visit. Look out for more posts in the future!