Match Day is when fourth-year medical students find out which hospital they will do their residency at. This book goes into some of the history behind how Match Day came to be what it is, but it mostly talks about the anxiety, anticipation, and stress around and leading up to the day. The book follows three soon-to-be doctors as they make decisions about how they will rank their choices. The book also follows the doctors through their first year of residency.
The most fascinating part was reading about how each of the doctor’s personal relationships fared as a result of Match Day and the first year of residency.
This book followed the Match Day experience of all three doctors fairly well and made me care about each of them. But when it came to the residency part, it really focused just on one of them. This book could have been longer with more details about the experiences of the other doctors or it should have just followed the one doctor.
2 comments:
Ugh. Match day. Having my wife go through that ordeal was torturous. We spent hours trying to strategize how to rank the different residency programs based upon hints and intuitions gained during the interview process so that she would get into the best-possible program. Then it just didn't matter. All these hopes and fears and yes, anxieties, cast aside by some computer calculating a fancy algorithm. Actually, I think it's a bunch of monkeys throwing darts that make the decision. It's a process I wouldn't wish on anyone. I'm sure it makes for an interesting read, but I think I am still dealing with some vestiges of the stress that season caused us and it was more than four years ago. Glad we never have to do it again.
Yes, I was most fascinated with how Match Day affected the medical students' relationships - how the spouse/significant other's life and career can also be greatly affected by where the Dr. is going to spend the next 3+ years.
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