Brief synopsis...

The timeline of all this stuff comes out through this blog if you read from the beginning, of course, but who on earth wants to do that? Thinking back on everything, and with prospective students I talk to, the entire process of becoming a doctor is frigging confusing.

In other news, after over a year of my mother's pleading, I have a new profile picture. Kagome is dead. I'm probably going to give her about a month of peace before I switch to Ed from Cowboy Bebop, because that's how I roll.

The cliff notes of what I've been doing:
-finish bachelor's of sciences in US while taking MCAT (difficult but moderately priced test)
-2 years of basic sciences in the Caribbean. A more clever blogger than I referred to this as the Bob Marley School of Medicine.
-USMLE Step 1 (giant expensive test)
-1 year of core rotations (internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, psych, OB/Gyn, etc) at a hospital in Brooklyn;
-USMLE Step 2 CS/Step 2 CK (two giant expensive tests)
-1 year of elective rotations at varying hospitals (okay, still in BK; I'm lazy)
-Graduate with Medical Degree
-Obtain ECFMG certificate (that's a bonus for us foreign kids)

FWI, you're still paying for all of this at this stage. For the last two years, you work in a hospital, but you are a paying student.

During this time, you must secure a residency for when you are out of medical school or you can be a doctor all you want, but you can't practice. A residency is additional training, for which you are paid, and this is what trains you to your specialty. Anyone graduating medical school is a doctor, but only people completing a pediatric residency are pediatricians. The process of securing a residency (since everyone's applying for them at the same time) is called the Match.

The Match:
-September through February of last academic year, choose a medicine specialty you want to practice and apply through a paid central database to programs you select.
-During this time, those programs that want to interview you grant you dates for them. You attend as many as you are able
-Mid February: submit a rank list. This is your favorite programs in order from top to bottom of your preference. How you rank stuff is up to you... location, training, prestige, hotness of fellow residents, etc. The programs are simultaneously ranking you.
-February to March: The central computers match up (get it?) applicants to programs. Programs with unfilled residency spots lose thousands of dollars for having those spots vacant. Applicants with no programs are jobless for a year while their loans go into repayment. Stakes are high. The computer uses an algorithm that tries to match the highest ranking applicant to the highest ranking program. If Pediatrics at Tulane loves Lucy and Lucy loves Tulane, and neither Tulane nor Lucy love anyone more. Match. This takes a while.
-Third Monday in March: Black Monday. The computers release whether students have successfully matched. Location is not disclosed.
-Tuesday-Thursday: Scramble: A list of the programs with unfilled positions is released to the unmatched applicants and a predictable clusterf-- of frantic emailing, faxing, and calling ensues. Applicants may have to switch specialties and explore other geographic regions to ensure a job.
-Thursday: Match Day. At noon EDT, the names of the programs are released to the people that matched there. Most American medical schools have a large ceremony to commemorate this. Some friends and I are making our own.

The name and specialty that is released on Thursday is where you are contractually obligated to go on July 1st of that year to begin residency training. The first year of residency (which used to be more of a transitional year, though now there are still transitional years and preliminary years) is what most people think of when they refer to "interns".

Usually, after your first year of residency, you take USMLE Step 3 (giant expensive test).
Near the end of your residency, you take the board exams (massive excruciatingly expensive tests) for that specialty. You also start a version of the Match all over again around then if you're applying for a fellowship, which is yet another 1-2 years of training for subspecialty fields (like pediatric cardiology).

So there we go... a probably largely unnecessary "Becoming a Doctor for Dummies" guide. Now back to being excited for the big reveal in ten hours.

Much love

to you guys in the trenches that are having to deal with this scramble nonsense this year with the server crashes. I can't even imagine what that must feel like, but my thoughts and hopes are with you. Good luck!!!!!!!!!

America! F- yeah!!

I MATCHED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT

After March 25th, I am done with school forever, and I have a big-girl doctor job waiting for me in July. On Thursday, I find out where I'm going, but I did it!!!!!!

Everyone's leaving :(

Since I'm January class, people are finishing their clinicals at vastly different times since you can do anything from back to back everything and finish by December 31st or stretch the pain out until the beginning of June if you want scads of time off.

Everyone's also running really low on cash since all that extra time gives us loan check-less windows, so people are gradually dispersing back to their respective homes, which is sad. I know I'll see them again at graduation, but still. It's Grenada all over again; I get busy for a few days and then three people have left and I'm like "Wait... you're... gone? For reals? Oh..."

As of March 25th, I'm done with school. Forever. That is extremely frigging weird.

Less than two weeks until Match Day now. There's just really not much to say.

So what have I been up to then... I got to make and bottle my own beer for the first time, so now I'm the proud owner of 20 22oz bottles of dark beer, an amsterdam style and a wheat beer. I was part-creator of the wheat beer.

I'm doing radiation oncology, which is hitting me in the face with a whole new realm of medicine I knew absolutely nothing about, barring the words "prostate cancer". Usually I can BS along when being pimped, but this week's question was "Do you know what a linear accelerator is?" In what was probably the most intelligent answer, I've *ever* given, I cleanly stated "No." Not even going to try, homeboy.

I've gotten to be in the room where they actually give the radiation (not *while* they give it. In contrast to most of the giant intimidating machines in radiology, this one not only says "Danger" on the door, but "GRAVE Danger". Yikes). In fairness, the patients come out of it with little to few symptoms. In set up, it looks like a room where someone would try to kill James Bond.

This rotation has its own physicist... like PhD only, locked in a dark room surrounded by books with more diagrams than words and computers physicist.

I think this also may be the one field of medicine I genuinely couldn't do. While pathology is my life's love, I feel like with appropriate training, I *could* be a proficient surgeon, internist, dermatologist, hell, even pediatrician, but if you stick me in a room with the hard sciences and ask me to run quality control on a computer that is calculating frequencies and wavelengths on gamma rays that are being aimed at genitals, I am absolutely one hundred percent going to kill someone. I can't even divide a bar tab.

On a related note, anyone know anything awesome going on in NYC for Mardi Gras that's cheap? And no, $40 isn't cheap.

Official ROL Due Date

Medical school is full of all sorts of little pseudo holidays, particularly at this time of year, since short of Valentine's Day and Presidents Day (ew and snore, respectively) we're lacking on real holidays.

As of February 23rd, at 9 PM EST, our rank order lists were due, as are the rank lists of the programs. This means that everything is now in the hands of a computer algorithm and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Spooky, but also removes the stress of reordering your list every ten minutes because you had a beignet craving at 11 PM and thought "Maybe that New Orleans program wasn't so bad", and then you panicked and changed it back.

March 14: find out if you have a job day
March 15 and 16th: Scramble days. This is a holiday the way a Christmas Eve where your wife leaves with your best friend, taking the kids and the dog with her is a holiday.
March 17: Match Day. Find out WHERE you have a job day. Incidentally, St. Patrick's Day. Incidentally, probably going to be "Stomach pumped" day.

Good luck everyone!!!!