Beware The Ides of March . . .

William Shakespeare must have, at some point, been a fourth year medical student. As you may not be aware, March 15th is what, for me and tens of thousands of other fourth year medical students across the country, is known as Match Day. This is the day that the National Residency Match Program releases the results of where everyone will be doing their residency training. To sum up how it works, we as applicants apply and interview at various programs from about November to January. At the end of February we the applicants rank the programs we applied to from 1 down to however many you applied. The programs also rank all the kids that applied from whom they want the most on down. These rank lists go into a computer and through some algorithm and/or gorrilla math it spits out matches of students and programs. Obviously if you are a more competitive applicant, the likelihood of you getting your first choice is higher. If you're a big slacker, you might get your last choice or even not rank at all. If you do rank, you are contractually bound to fulfill that committment to wherever you matched.

Anyway, for me this is all revealed one week from tomorrow at a mini-ceremony for our class. Pray that I will readily accept wherever God has placed me. Hopefully my first choice, but God seems to like to do his own thing, so I kind of won't be surprised if its not. Either way, for fourth years, beware the Ides of March.