Mark matched two weeks ago.
For those of you lucky non-medical people, that means he officially has a job next year. The process is daunting, expensive, and full of a whole lot of waiting. And now that we’re on the other side with a little bit of distance, I thought I’d take a moment to write about the logistics of matching with a family involved and what this means for our little family.
The Match is a system designed to match new doctors with a residency spot in their particular specialty. While Mark will officially be an M.D. in June, legally he is not allowed to practice medicine unsupervised until he’s completed residency, a set of training years. Residency times vary by specialty; his will be 5 years. Residents work long hours for very little money (fun fact: it works out to be less than minimum wage sometimes) learning more about their craft.
Last summer, Mark began the process by completing 3 sub-internships at hospitals he was interested in. A sub-internship is a clinical rotation where the medical student is expected to behave more like a resident than a student. Mark completed 2 of those at programs near where we live, and one of those in Atlanta, which meant that for the month of July he lived with my college roommate and her family. Sub-internships help a medical student get their foot in the door of a program. They allow the program to put a face with the name on an application and the student to get a better feel for a program than they would in an interview setting.
We also spent some time winnowing down the list of programs Mark would be applying to. Not all hospitals have residency programs, and not all of those that do have programs in every field. Michigan only has a handful of urology programs, so we had to look at other states too to get to the number of applications he needed to match. Because we have a family, we focused most of our attention at those programs near where we had family or friends, that were within driving distance to his parents, or that were near big airports. One thing we have learned the past four years is that it truly does take a village, especially when you have a husband who regularly works 80hr weeks.
We also cut states and cities that have a high cost of living. A resident makes approximately $50,000 a year, which is much more than a medical student, but will make for a tight budget for our family of 6. Knowing that we value a short commute for Mark, we wanted to make sure we would be able to live near the hospital he’d be working at. That made cities like New York, or states like California easy to cut.
The final cut we made was to places that we knew we didn’t want to live at all. This category was mostly mine, and included all the states north of Michigan (I’m looking at you Minnesota). I am still a Georgia girl at heart, at least when it comes to the weather, and the thought of worse winters than we have here was too much for me.
Once we had our list, and the applications were live, we waited. Waiting seems like a good place to end Part 1. . . .