At the stroke of noon on Thursday, March 17, 147 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine students will gather in an emotion-filled ceremony to open their “residency placement” envelopes and learn where they will spend the next few years receiving their advanced medical training.
Match Day is the climax of a process that began in the fall through the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP), which helps pair graduating medical students with the hospital or medical center of their choice. But really it’s the culmination of years of hard work, sleepless nights, and personal and professional fulfillment that medical students face on their way to becoming doctors.
In her first post to this blog, Penn fourth-year medical student Katie Baratz Dalke looks back on her path through medical school and shares her hopes for the future.
A Light At the End of An Email
Katie Baratz Dalke
The last year has found me unusually attached to my email. Not just in my typical "Is there a sale at Banana Republic?" or "Did my Bioethics Masters advisor answer that question?" manner, but in an existential and emotional way. It’s to the point that my husband says that my relationship to my email is more significant than ours. He’s joking. I think...
My tumultuous love-hate relationship with my email began last summer, when ERAS (the online residency application service) opened for business. As I compiled my application for a residency in Psychiatry, email was beautiful, a way for me to contact the people who wrote me letters of recommendation and to get help from my advisors about my personal statement. Together, email and I reflected on my time at Penn Med, remembering my amazing months on psychiatry at the VA and at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) and the wonderful mentoring relationships I’d developed with attendings in Psychiatry as well as in Pediatrics, Internal Medicine, and Radiation Oncology. We recalled the way that my extra-curricular experience working with and advocating for patients with chronic medical diagnoses helped me to realize that medicine is, for me, helping people to cope with illness and enabling them to achieve the best quality of life possible. The summer was hot, the Phillies were winning, and life with my email was good.
By the time the leaves changed, however, the honeymoon was over. I submitted my application, and began waiting anxiously to hear back from the residency programs to which I’d applied. I returned email’s silence with the cold shoulder, shortly forgiving and forgetting as I checked again and again for invitations to interview. When a program responded in the affirmative, it was email I loved as I scheduled interviews, booked travel arrangements, contacted friends and alumni in the cities I would be visiting to let them know I was coming, and thanked my interviewers.
As interview season ended and the ground froze in December, so too did our love affair. It’s not you, it’s me, I told email, citing my need for a short break while I cleared my head in anticipation of the coming spring. By Valentine’s Day, we were beginning to rekindle our relationship, working together on the organization and direction of this year’s Spoof show, Phallus in Wonderland, a distraction that allowed us to bear the anxiety of waiting until Match week.
With the budding of flowers and the warming of the air, email is once again my first—I mean second (sorry, Sam!)— love once more. I just heard from the NRMP, the organization that processes the Match, that I am successfully matched in Psychiatry! Although I won’t know for sure where I’ll end up until Thursday’s Match ceremony, at least I’ll have email to keep me busy planning Spoof in preparation of our performances next Saturday, March 26. It’s good to know that no matter what happens between me and email, we’ll always have Spoof.
See the full suite of Penn Medicine Match Day news, as well as last year's Match Day student blogs, at the Penn Medicine Match Day feature site.