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Match Day: I can't believe it's 3 months away.

Match Day is when 4th year medical students find out which residency program they matched with. Next year, that day is March 15. On March 13, two days before, you find out IF you matched or not. If you don't match, then you have two days to "scramble" into a program, ANY program that wishes to take you. This means you could end up doing a residency you didn't plan on doing(i.e. a person who wanted to do Surgery must now do Internal Medicine) or in a residency program that is not the most ideal for you. This also involves a lot of phone calls, faxes and pulling-your-hair-out moments. We do NOT want this to happen. BASICALLY, Match Day is when I find out what I'll be doing for the next three years of my life.

So what is this "Match" business anyway? The match is what determines the residency program medical students will be accepted into. How this works is, fourth year medical students apply to their programs of choice during late summer/early fall. Programs choose which students to interview and the interview season lasts from Oct-Jan-ish. The programs then rank their interviewees. The students rank the programs they want. These two rank lists are put into a computer where an algorithm figures out what is the perfect match.

In my head, here's how I think it works. Let's say a program accepts 9 residents and they 30 applicants from 1-30. The top 9 are automatically "in." But if any of those top 9 fail to rank that program as number 1 on their list, then number 10 moves up to 9 and the rest follow. Same goes for the student. Let's say a student ranks 3 programs. But their number 1 program doesn't rank the student. Then their number 2 slot moves to number 1 and they will match at that program. Who's bored and confused? So the computer figures that out and comes up with a "match" which is released on...wait for it, MATCH DAY!

You can all thank Nancy for that wonderful blog since she asked me. I figured I'd enlighten those of you who didn't know. Hell, I'm going through it and I'm STILL confused.