Interviews Schedule

The headache is (almost) gone, likely because my interviews are (almost) completely set. The uncertainty was the most not-fun part. You submit all your information into many different parts of a single website, and you just hope that it all comes together correctly. You hope that the administrative team at your medical school uploaded your picture without drawing a mustache on your face (can't blame them if they did), and you hope that your letter-writers didn't discuss the time you called them "ma'am" instead of "sir" (repeatedly). If the interviews start rolling in, then at least one of these things didn't happen. Then, you are baked til golden.

The interviews are the fun part. Most interviews consist of an evening gathering the night before with the residents, followed by a full day of interviews starting the next morning. Based on most of the schedules, it looks like there is usually a Grand Rounds, a tour, some presentations, and some interviews. Though some places have a reputation for being intense (asking medical/ethical questions until you are thoroughly embarrassed by your lack of knowledge), most of my friends have had relatively chill interviews. Just people trying to get to know other people. The interview goes both ways too -- you are trying to show your stuff, but at the same time, they are trying to sell you on their program. Both parties are looking for the right fit.

While I am still waiting on a couple more to roll in, my interview schedule is fairly set. Organizing my flights and planning when and where I must be was more harrowing than I thought. Some places that I would have loved to interview just wouldn't fit in my schedule. I would've had to cancel two (or sometimes three) of my other interviews just to get there. Geographically, I applied all over the map, so logistics were a little bit of a bear. But anywho, this is likely the final line-up, listed in chronological order. My first stop will be Atlanta in mid-November, ending up in Philadelphia in mid-January! Ten interviews over two months. I am excited for all of them.

• Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia)
• Oregon Health & Science University (Portland, Oregon)
• University of California - San Francisco (San Francisco, California)
• Stanford University (Palo Alto, California)
• Washington University - St. Louis (St. Louis, Missouri)
• Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois)
• University of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois)
• Vanderbilt University (Nasheville, Tennessee)
• University of California - Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California)
• University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Next comes the interview prep. Gotta be ready for the standard questions (Why surgery? Why here? What's that in your teeth?), and you have to have questions ready of your own. Each program has a website full of information about their clinical experience, research, and philosophy, and some have mailed/emailed additional information to peruse. Lots of prep, lots of prep.

But this is indeed the fun part. After January 18th, it's two months of the not-fun part again...

The Waiting.

Announcing @ResidentMurmurs!

For the three people (and my Mom) who actually read these posts, I want to go ahead and announce that I will be officially retiring The Language of Medicine after its five year anniversary at the end of December. Five years is a nice round number, and it is time to move on to bigger and better things.

Instead, I will begin contributing to Resident Murmurs (www.residentmurmurs.org), an online forum that is halfway between personal blog and academic journal. This is a joint venture comprised of three of my closest friends and me, all of us soon-to-be physicians. As we write in our mission statement, "We are four physicians committed to the core principles of integrity, compassion, empathy, humility, respect, and delivery of holistic care. Resident Murmurs is a forum in which we explore and promote humanism in medicine through thoughtful reflection, based on patient and provider experiences with health, illness, life, and death." Through narrative, we seek to acknowledge and advance the powerful role of human experience in healing.

You can sign up for our mailing list on our website, and don't forget to follow us on Twitter (@ResidentMurmurs). The full site will launch in mid-February, with content beginning on March 21, 2014 (aka "Match Day").

Seed money was provided by the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at the Harvard Kennedy School. You can find our first press release here on their website.

My peeps... I met Sophia McKinley and Eric Seymour last year, as they were both Zuckerman Fellows at CPL. Dinushika Mohottige you actually already know (she is one of my closest friends and I profiled her here on this blog years ago!). Sophia, Eric, and I are all applying now to residency, while Dinushika is an Internal Medicine intern at Duke. Future Dr. McKinley and I are applying in General Surgery; Eric will be a Pediatrician. The four of us have very different backgrounds and writing styles, which will make the next few years the absolute funnest.

The four of us will initially start with weekly content, slowly building our web and social media presence. We eventually hope to partner with other organizations and institutions as we move #humanisminmedicine forward. To help do this, we will start accepting submissions from patients and providers alike within the first year. We hope to hear from all of you! More on that to come.

On that note, "we invite you to join us in building this special space where medicine, writing, and humanism can intertwine to provide reflective pause, combat the corroding effects of training, and promote more caring in medicine."

www.residentmurmurs.org

The Headache Relieved

So I told you that I've had a headache. It's from the stress. On days that I'm busy, the headache goes away. But most days I'm on my computer... for hours and hours and hours. In class. Doing research. Always on the computer. I watch that little Gmail tab, waiting... And waiting. And waiting.

Yesterday, though, my headache was relieved. For good. In the same way that I felt about three inches taller when I got my first acceptance to medical school, everything was right with the world. I got one of the "big ones." Not necessarily my number one (because there really isn't a "#1" until you've interviewed at all the schools ), but it could be. I received an invitation to interview at a program that makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. One these programs where I say, "Hey, if they'll interview me, anyone will." So now my headache is gone. And then a few more rolled in. They have generally been trickling in at about a rate of one every other day.

Usually, the more I stare at my computer, the less likely one of these "noreply" emails is likely to show up. But right in the middle of my Writing class, I clicked on the "Inbox (1) - rswendim..." tab in Google Chrome, and there she was. Beautiful. Wondrous. Headache-relieving. In my head I did a little dance (a solid C-walk, or the "Not My Baby" dance), and I may or may not have swore out loud (though not loud enough for the professor to hear, fortunately). I worded the acceptance email so so so carefully, making sure the spelling was just perfect.

I have to be care, because in my excitement, I've already make a couple mistakes on the salutations. As embarrassing as it is to say, I've incorrectly addressed one program coordinator as "Mr." instead of "Ms.", and for an invite I received recently, I put "Dr." because I could not figure out who I was replying to (it was at night, I only had my cheap Windows phone, and the Google search function was being ornery). No bueno.

As you can see, I'm barely keeping it together. Each day is an emotional roller coaster.

Over the next few weeks I will finalize my list. Each specialty has the golden match statistics - ideal number of programs to apply to and interview with to match (on average - obviously it is different per person). For General Surgery, the target number is somewhere around 22 programs and 11 interviews. I applied to 26 residencies, and I think I want to interview at about 10 places total. My programs are very spread out across the country, so there will be a lot of flying. Ten's a good number; I like ten. I like ten. And I've started repeating things (repeating things).

Okay, no more stress posts. Next stop, the interview trail!

The Headache Builds

Being in back in class this semester is both a blessing and a curse. My classes are wonderful. I am taking one called Public Narrative: Story of Self, Us, and Now which teaches a leadership framework for drawing others to a cause. It's basically a class on how to tell a good story. The second is a writing course, where I am (re)learning the basics of writing, revising, and editing. In addition, I have the chance to pursue my own freelance writing, and start finishing up some research projects early (though the chance that these will finish before the spring is slim to none).

The downside is that I am on my computer 24/7.

I first started getting headaches only towards at the end of the day. Originally I thought it was due to staring at a large white screen for so much of the day. But the dull pain has started earlier and earlier. Today I realized that it is more likely due to the stress of interviews, i.e. the stress of not getting more interviews, though I'm sure being on the computer for eight hours a day only compounds the problem.

I figured that after October 1st, I would start hearing from program after program, either with invitations or rejections. However, all I hear from my inbox is crickets these days. Those first few invites have ruined me. Such a tease. Being in class and on my computer all day, the minutes now tick by so slowly. Each time I see a new email come to my inbox, the tab says...

"Inbox (1) - rswendiman@gma..."

I immediately rush to check to see if it's from a residency program, but it never is. It's just another Priceline.com email again. I get about 100 emails a day at this point, and each of them is a huge letdown.

One of my classmates told me that some interviews won't go out until beginning of November. I think my head is going to explode.

SO WHAT IF I'M CRAZY!?!? SO ARE YOU!

I'm also leaving my phone on at night so I wake up to new emails. Generally, I'm so tired by the end of the day that I wouldn't pop up to a fire alarm, but some nights I do wake up to that damn ding-a-ling sound. Lately, I've been waking up at 2:33am. That's when the Kennedy School sends out their daily announcement email for the day. Thanks, HKS.

The weird thing is, I won't be like this for the actual interviews. I enjoy them. It's the part that I can't control that I hate.

This will all be better in a month.

Or maybe not.

AHHHHH!!