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[On match day, I found out for residency I will be going to] Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass. for Internal Medicine. My fiancé, Gavin Kuns, DO ’18, also matched at the same residency, and same program.

Applying to residency as a couple adds an extra dynamic to writing your rank list. Instead of a traditional list with your programs ranked in order from favorite to least favorite, you have to create two lists that mirror each other and account for the possibility that you may end up at separate programs. For us, the factors that influenced our choices were primarily our experience on the interview day and/or rotations. By the end of interview season, we got much better at looking for the right “feel” in a program. As much as geographic location matters, so does the fit of your academic goals and personality. What are the current residents like? Are they happy at work? How are they treated by faculty? I thought it would be impossible to judge a program’s fit through only one interview day, but it’s easier than it sounds. It was most helpful to keep an open mind on interview day. Even after all of the reading we had done, the program we thought we would like best was not a great fit for us on interview. Likewise, we were surprised to fall in love with the residency where we ended up matching.

It’s difficult to put into words [how it feels opening the envelope on match day]. Even though I knew we had both matched somewhere (you find out the Monday of match week), not knowing where caused a lot of nervous energy. The anticipation for opening the envelope builds for about 10 months. We hadn’t been sleeping well and my heart would suddenly race even at rest. For us, exercise seemed to be the only help in those days. Opening the actual envelope was a blur. My fingers felt so clumsy! It was impossible to process the news right away. We were so relieved. It’s a strange feeling to not know where you will be working and living in 3 months. I’m glad we attended UNECOM’s match day event because even better than opening our own letters was the pride I felt watching my friends open theirs. It finally hit me how much we had grown and achieved.

[Deciding on a specialty was] quite a challenge for me. I’ve always had difficulty choosing career paths because I’m usually drawn to several options. After college, I was stuck between futures in healthcare, education, and municipal engineering. Choosing a medical specialty was a similar journey. The most help came when I began clinical clerkship during third year. The easiest approach for me was to first answer: do I like surgery or not? Though I liked procedures, I discovered I wanted more patient interaction than surgery which pushed me toward the world of medicine. My biggest struggle was between family medicine and internal medicine. My third year clerkship site was a hospital with a great family medicine residency and I knew that track would be a good option for me since you get longevity with patients and a wide range of training. The reason I ended up in internal medicine was because I wasn’t sure yet if I might want to specialize (internal offers more options), and though I enjoyed obstetrics and pediatrics as a med student, I knew they weren’t major career interests of mine. The toughest part might be determining if you like a field itself or more the person you happen to be working with. I would bet many doctors today practice in fields because they once had an enthusiastic attending in that field who took an interest in their learning and made them feel motivated and inspired. That’s not such a bad thing!