Medical students look forward to one day during their fourth year of school with unprecedented anticipation. That day is not graduation. Graduation is a mere formality and almost a nuisance. Fourth years are pretty much checked out sometime around October and are looking to their futures. They day that they are looking forward to is called 'Match Day'.
No, Match Day is not the day where medical students receive tips on how to match their shirts to their pants or their socks with each other (perhaps there should be some time dedicated to this in medical school because fashion sense is not something that medical students excel in). Match Day is a day in mid-March where medical students find out where they will be spending the next 3 to 7 years of their lives in that breeze in the park known as 'residency' (N.B., by "breeze in the park", I mean anything but a breeze in the park. 4 days off a month, working holidays, incessant pages (yes, we still use pagers) and more!).
The build up to Match Day is more than 6 months long. In early August, ERAS opens for editing. ERAS is a convenient universal form for residency applications. Although it is convenient, it is perhaps one of the most arcane and byzantine pieces of software I have ever used. Every action requires a click, followed by a window followed by two or three more clicks... and then you aren't sure if the preceding series of clicks actually completed the desired action, so you click back through again to make sure it did what you wanted to do. After all but 1 too many hours of working on this stupid abomination of a program, you let the application age and mellow until September 1st, the date ERAS opens for submission.
What occurs next is a process that is strange and I imagine is something like what occurs when high school athletes go through when looking at playing D-1 sports. Some places express interest in you and invite you for an 'interview', other places reject you outright, some places just leave you hanging, but it's clear, people out there want you... they need you. But wait a minute, Dr. Harvey, why did you put those quote marks around "interview"? How observant of you, I'm so glad you asked! Up to this point, my experience with interviews is a 1-2 hour process where you show up and the spotlight is on you, sometimes feeling more like an interrogation directed by members of the FSB. You'd imagine that residency interviews were something like this, but they are so far removed from the idea of an interview in your head that they don't even deserve the same name. These 'interviews' are more like hard-sell recruitment sessions. They start the night before with a dinner (one of these dinners was the occasion of my having a bread pudding that I call the 'ontological proof for God's existance', i.e., that than which nothing greater can be thought). Then the next day over the course of 6-8 hours you are fed at least twice, put through hours of slide shows as to why you should go to this program and why they are awesome, led on tour after tour (if I am led around the inside of one more hospital, it will be too soon) and then you have a 1 or 2 brief, low-key interviews. These interviews were described to me by a member of faculty as "making sure you're not some social freak."
People often ask me questions that would make sense like, "when do you know if you get in?" Or, "What if you get multiple offers?" But The Match is a whole different ballgame. In February, the warlocks of the NRMP demand of you your "rank-list" and likewise they take rank-lists from each applicant and program. They take these lists into their lair deep below Stonehenge, apply potions and perform seances (This is not the official story of the NRMP. They claim to use 'computers' and 'algorithms', like THAT is believable). After about a month, they return with The Match, which you are only allowed to find out about on Match Day. You are matched to one and only one program. You are contractually obliged to accept that position.
Kind of nerve wracking, ain't it?
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