Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match

A week from tomorrow is Match Day.

Lots of friends and family have asked me - "where are you going next year?  Did you choose yet?"  The truth is, graduating medical students don't get to choose their residency training programs, the way, for example, that graduating high school students choose their college.  We don't get a slew of acceptances and then a chance to say yes to one.  Instead, there is a magical, mysterious tradition called ... *ominous drum roll* ... "The Match."

  

For my non-medical friends, here is how The Match works (with a little cynical embellishment on my part):

1. By the beginning of senior year, a medical student, now a pitiful, downtrodden version of herself, completely ravaged by the system, chooses a specialty.  
   
2. She researches hospitals which offer residency training programs in the chosen specialty, and applies.
   
3. Residency programs pick up her phonebook-sized application packet, throw everything away except for the page that has the exam scores, and decided whether or not to interview her based on this.
   
4. Pitiful medical student cleans herself up, buys a fancy monkey suit, and goes on interviews - a butt-load of 'em.  In this process, her face muscles become fatigued from all of the smiling and talking about how hard she loves to work, her wallet becomes empty from all of the hotel fees and airfare, her suit pants become tight from all of the free food used to seduce applicants, and her dry cleaner wonders why this strange girl wears only that one outfit.
   
5. Once interview season is complete, the medical student thinks about which program had the best free food, and ranks her favorite programs in descending order.  
   
6. Hospitals also make a list, although their list is in order based on that one page of the application with the exam scores on it, and then they just cross people off who were really weird or didn't smile enough in the interview. 
   
7. Both of these lists are entered into a state-of-the-art computer, which *beeps* and *boops* and *processes* the lists for about a month until a match is made.  Meanwhile, the medical student becomes afflicted by a very severe case of a disease known as senior-itis.  For the first time in 3.5 years, she gets plenty of sleep and eats 3 meals a day.  She begins to look like her ol' self again.   And she occasionally goes to class.
   
8. On the third Thursday of March every year, "Match Day," all of the graduating medical students across the country open an envelope.  Inside the envelope is the name of their match: their future residency program.
   
9. Come July, the young doctor, a student no more, starts residency, where she may learn her specialty and become pitiful and downtrodden once more.  
   

The end.

Wish me luck next Thursday!