The Match

I guess I owe everyone an explanation. At least those who have no idea how this medical school thing works. For the last 6 months we haven't even been able to answer the simple question, Where are you now? or Where do you live? When we try to explain audition rotations, the match and residency everyone just looks at us like, HUH? So here goes my attempt at a simple explanation that will probably turn complicated.

As most of you who have followed this blog know we spent our first two years of Medical School in Des Moines Iowa where Brad attended DMU for the didactic part of school. The third and fourth year of school are Clinical years spent with doctors in different specialties. He changes the doctor and specialty he is working in every 4 weeks. We did our third year in Casper WY and the fourth year that we are currently in is when everything got complicated.

Brad has spent the last 6 months doing his clinical rotations in places that we are interested in doing residency. He has decided he wants to be and Emergency Medicine doctor which means residency is 4 years. Most people have quite a list of places they apply to but Brad took the untraditional route and narrowed things down before hand. He only applied to 6 residencies he rotated and interviewed at all but one of those. He got a pretty good feel for the programs that he will potentially end up in.

I was able to visit all of our potential locations as well. So I get to have my own opinion of each area and I was very pleased with all of our options. Honestly I don't think we can go wrong. Which makes the next part of this process that much more difficult.

The Match...We had to rank the programs Brad applied and interviewed at and those programs will do the same thing. And the system MATCHES everyone trying to give them their top choices. Our ranks were due on January 27 and now is the waiting game. On February 13 we find out where we match. And if we don't match, then we scramble...meaning we look for programs that didn't fill and go from there.

So let the countdown begin until we find out our fate. I have a feeling this is going to be a long 2 weeks.

This is kind of how we feel about our future right now.

As for all of my 365 pictures. I'm way behind so I'll try and get them posted this week.