Friday, October 28, 2011

The Trail

The next few months of our life are pretty unique if you aren't familiar with how medical school/residency works.  I've found that most people's idea is some combination of Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs, and House, which is usually pretty far from reality.

The terminology usually confuses people, but medical school is 4 years and you are only ever known as a medical student or occasionally a sub-intern in the 4th year.  You are officially a doctor when you graduate medical school, but you go on to further training, called residency.  The first year of residents are called "interns."    In Pediatrics, 2nd and 3rd year residents are known as "upper levels," "residents," or "senior residents."  Also unique to Pediatrics and a few other specialties, "chief residents" are doctors who are elected to stay an extra year after 3rd year to serve in an administrative/leadership position.  Beyond residency, doctors are known as "attendings" if they are in an academic setting where they are overseeing residents and medical students, or they are just board certified physicians.  So, this next step is a 3 year training process, but it is a job where I am getting paid, etc.  The climate of residency has changed a lot over the past 10 years, where they used to have no duty hour regulations but now, we are limited to 80 hour weeks with no more than something like 26 consecutive hours of patient care.  New this year, interns are only allowed to do 16 hours in a row, eliminating overnight call.  Most programs I've looked into have gone over to shift work, which a lot of people don't like for some reason, but I enjoy coming home at night so it sounds good to me.  I guess I'll see what I think next year.

A few months ago, Mark and I decided on different parts of the country where we would be willing to move based mainly on places with good job opportunities for him.  We landed on Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and New York.  It was pretty easy for me to find some great programs to apply to because they are all big cities with good options.  I sent in my application at the beginning of September, and we've set up all of the interviews between now and Christmas.  After I visit and interview with the programs, I'll enter a list ranking all of the programs where I'd be willing to train into a national ranking website.  All of the programs submit a list ranking their applicants and the computer matches you to one program.  On Friday, March 16, we'll go up to campus and after some anticipatory festivities, everyone in my class along with everyone across the country will open envelopes at the same time and find out where they are going.  Exciting!

So, between now and then, I'm going to try to keep the blog up to date with our travels around the country.  We've already visited Seattle and it was a great start!  It all started to feel real when our plane landed in Seattle and Mark and I started talking about how it could possibly be our next home.  Mark is going to come to each city once with me so we can make a good decision together, and he is trying to network with some companies in each place to feel out the job market.  It is a really exciting time for us, filled with a lot of unknowns but we are looking forward to this next step!

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