***Updated*** It's coming!

I have updated the entry about Monday because I learned more about how it will work. I'm still hanging in there waiting waiting waiting. Just ready for next week to be here (though once it is there's no going back, so that part is a bit scary... thanks for all your thoughts and prayers! I will keep everyone posted! haha literally!

Since Match Day is just around the corner (finally!), I thought I would write a quick post to remind everyone just what I will find out, how, and when. It's a really good thing Match Week is almost here because let me tell you, all of us M4s are just getting a little on edge. We don't talk a lot about it because everyone has various degrees of anxiety about it, and even for the most assured med student, Match Day brings up a myriad of emotions. You can't help but be a bit nervous when you have to open up an envelope to find out if you have a job next year and then wait a week and open up another envelope to find out where that job is going to be. For most people this has a profound impact on their life. First and foremost we have all put a lot of blood sweat and tears into the last 4 years (ok, maybe not so much of the blood or sweat, a few tears, mostly just a helluva lot of hours of our lives, put school ahead of family and friends and housecleaning and personal wellness, and pretty much anything else you can think of). Not to mention the extremely high ticket price of the last 4 years, and the hope that, at the very least, next year we can stop tumbling into the black hole of debt. Some day I will do a blog post to dazzle you with my future value of money skills, but suffice it to say 99% of the people who go through med school do so with student loans and at $32,000/yr for tuition plus living expenses, you can do the math and figure out you're not getting outta here with less than 6 figures into the red. So anyway, the resident salary of $50,000 is pretty darn appealing and if you think about it, kinda like an $80,000 raise. Anyhow, I digress. So Match Week shapes up like this...

Monday, March 12
We have a class meeting at 10:30AM to vote on commencement issues. It is supposed to conclude by 11AM because at 12:00 noon Eastern time we receive an email with a web link where we can log in to find out if we matched. That's it. Not where, not what specialty (some people interview in more than one specialty). Just did you match: yes/no. (More specifically we get one of the following messages depending on situation:
Congratulations! You have matched!
We are sorry, you did not match to any position.
(For those people going into a specialty with an intern year the following are also possible)
Congratulations! You have matched to an advanced position but not a first-year position!
Congratulations! You have matched to a one-year position!

So that's all we find out Monday. However, for some people Monday is the HUGE day because they are more concerned about matching than about where. This is usually only the case for certain people going into a competitive specialty (ortho, derm, plastics...).

So Monday comes, we find out if we have a job next year... Then we wait....

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
Life as usual (unless you didn't match. Then there's a whole complex process of trying to find a position that I will just spare you)

Friday, March 16 MATCH DAY
Ceremony begins at 10:30AM CST in the atrium at the med school. The Dean says a few words, we are all super nervous (and probably a little buzzed bc it's sort of a tradition, at least among the cool kids, to 'tailgate' before Match Day, so we will be). No one really cares what the Dean has to say. We all just want 11:00 to arrive. At 12:00 Eastern Time, everywhere across the country, Match Day envelopes are distributed, so that means at 11:00 Central Time we will get our envelopes. I will spare you the details until after it has occurred, so I can more accurately recount them, but each person will receive his/her envelope and can open it wherever they choose. My heart is pounding just writing about this. It is a stressful day, and I think most medical students, past or present, will tell you it is a much bigger day than graduation. Anyway, inside of the envelope it will say the name of the program to which you have matched. Punto fin. And just like that we know where we'll live, lives are changed, relationships altered. It's a lot of power for one little envelope. Then we all call our moms.