Report from the Battle of Normandy

The Interviews
15 total, about 2/3 family medicine and 1/3 emergency medicine with one combined FM/EM program. The two specialties are more similar than most would suspect. Both require a very broad spectrum of knowledge gleaned from multiple fields and the ability to quickly develop rapport with patients of all ages. With rising numbers of uninsured patients, a growing proportion of visits to the emergency department involve primary care related issues.

Hands-Down Most Bizarre Interview Question: What is the glue that holds you together?
Answer:….um….Elmer’s..?
[in a Monty Python world, the rest of the exchange would go like this:
Interviewer: Elmer’s School Glue or Elmer’s Wood Glue?
Applicant: School Glue
Interviewer: Wrong, it’s Wood Glue!!!!
Applicant: (screams while being jettisoned off the bridge into the misty swamp below)]

Toward the end of interview season, attention deficit disorder emerges and your mind starts to wander, fluttering around frivolous trivialities: Why is the Applicant from New Jersey so distractingly tan in midwinter? or Where can I score some tater tots and a gin & tonic?

The Travel
6 flights, 5 rental cars, numerous road trips in my trusty Honda Civic, 7 hotel rooms, and several episodes of bittersweet chocolate intoxication. On the flight home from my final interview, while I drifted in and out of sleep in a haze of Sudafed (phenylephrine formula, not the good stuff with pseudoephedrine) and Halls menthol cough drops, the plane hit a patch of turbulence and was vigorously tossed in multiple directions.
Other people on the plane: Are we going to crash?
Me: Am I going to sustain a head injury and fall into a coma without submitting my rank order list?!

The Rank Order List
Medicine, being full of obsessive-compulsive types, loves lists. Applicants submit a list ranking the programs they have visited. Residency programs submit a list ranking the applicants they have interviewed. While creating the rank order list, applicants can omit programs they don’t want to attend; residency programs can omit applicants who are unacceptable to them. Everything goes into a giant centralized computer that runs a complicated algorithm multiple times during the 3 weeks between the rank order list deadline and Match Day. Why? They say it’s for quality assurance; I say it’s for pure, unadulterated torture. On Match Day, we each get an envelope with a sheet of paper that tells us what residency program we’ll be attending. And yes, it’s a binding contract, people. Run for your lives!