So, yesterday kicked off a four week period of lots of traveling and fellowship interviews for my hubby. I've had a number of people ask me to explain the whole "match" process, so if you already know this skip to the second half of the post. :)
In the medical world residency and fellowship locations are usually determined by the Match. Each specialty (Surgery, Family Medicine, OB Gyn, etc) has different levels of availability and competitiveness, but I'll tell you what it looks like for my husband - he's a Pediatric resident and he's applying for a Hematology/Oncology Fellowship (children's blood & cancer)
Step 1- he sent in his official electronic application and applied to 10 programs (done in November)
Step 2- if the program likes what they see they can offer him an interview at the hospital
Step 3- you usually want to interview at about 75% of the applied for programs, so Joel was hoping to interview at 6-8 places. He was lucky enough that all 10 asked for an interview, so he can be a little more picky and choosy about which places to interview.
Step 4- he travels to these 6-8 places for an all-day interview (you typically meet the other fellows, get a tour of the facilities, interview with quite a few of the staff, and finally the head of the Program)
Step 5- Once he's done with all of this interviews, he ranks the programs in order of which program he'd like to go to #1- being his first choice, #2 being his second choice, etc.
Step 6- The programs also rank all of their interviewee candidates in order of who they'd like to fill their fellowship openings
Step 7- Some magical computer out there puts Joel's (and every other fellowship candidates') rankings and the fellowship program rankings together, and after some crazy math and a little bit of voodoo, it matches each candidate and fellowship program with their highest possible ranking.
Joel was really blessed and matched with his first choice for residency, but we saw people that matched pretty low on their list or didn't match at all and had to scramble for any residency openings, so it can be a little nerve wracking. In Joel's year of medical school, there were a number of Plastic Surgery hopefuls that didn't match and had to scramble for something besides plastics, because it was such a competitive year for it.
Step 8- Joel will get an email on May 2nd telling him where he will be completing his fellowship. It's a done deal - you go where they tell you and hopefully you match well. (And then we wait a year, because the matching is a full year ahead of when he finishes residency). His fellowship will begin July 2013.
Is this making sense? Any questions?
Yesterday was Joel's 2nd Interview (we're still on Step 3):
Ohio State (Nationwide Children's Hospital)
Initial Thoughts:
Normally we list pros and cons of each program after the interview, but this one is a little different. Prior to Joel's interview yesterday, if you had asked either of us where we wanted to go for fellowship we would of told you - hands down - we wanted to stay at Nationwide Children's. We love it here in Columbus - we bought a house, have great friends, love the area, and Joel has loved his residency here. He loves the facilities, the doctors and nurses, the other fellows and residents - it's also a very good Hem/Onc program. We honestly really wanted to stay.
Then enters in interview day yesterday - to say it was underwhelming would be an understatement. The fellowship coordinator completely messed up the entire schedule for the day (she pulled the wrong person's schedule - it wasn't Joel's), so he sat around a lot, missed a very important interview, showed up early to a lot of interviews - all because of this lady's disorganization. He said that if he didn't personally know that the program was great from his own time here that this interview experience would have put the program at the bottom of his list. Then the final kicker was his interview with the program director. Typically a program director recruits pretty heavily to try to sell the program to the potential fellows, but Joel said it almost felt like he was trying to get Joel to consider other programs. The director made him feel like maybe they didn't want him in the program (which is odd, because earlier in the year he had told Joel he planned on recruiting him rigorously when the time came). The whole thing felt a bit off. He came home dejected and depressed.
He and I were both really sad, because we really wanted to stay. In fact, I think I had mentally always thought of us as staying here for 6 years - not 3. Joel later found out that the program director had been really ill during his interview and went home puking. Crazy. The poor guy was probably just trying not to upchuck on Joel. Joel also talked to one of his friends who is a current fellow at Nationwide, and his friend told him she had a similar interview. The director's not necessarily saying he doesn't want Joel to come to Ohio State, but he cares about him as an individual, so he wants Joel to be sure that this is the program that's best for him. So it's possible that he really does have a chance at matching here, but we just don't know.
Bottom Line: We're both at a loss what to think. We both still really would love to stay here, but this experience has also shifted our way of thinking. We will now be more active in the pursuit of keeping all our options open - including being truly open to the possibility of going somewhere else for fellowship. Let's just say we'll be making this decision with some serious amount of prayer. We'll see how the other interviews go. His next interview is tomorrow.
Our current rankings:
1. Nationwide Children's (Columbus)
2. Rainbow Babies (Cleveland)
