What is a medical residency?
A medical residency is onsite training a doctor (MD or DO) completes after graduating from medical school. Training can last anywhere between three to seven years depending on the specialty. A medical student typically applies and interviews with multiple programs in varying locations during their last year of medical school. The student then ranks each program in order from their most desirable to least desirable. In turn, each residency program also ranks their interviewees to who they would most like working in their program to least. Then an algorithm matches a student to a residency. Majority of these future residents find out where they match on the same day in March called Match Day!
My husband applied to 40 different neurology residencies throughout the United States. He was offered and completed 11 virtual interviews from those applications. Of the 40 neurology programs my husband applied to, he would not consider any of them to be bad programs. He did his research with each one and only applied to programs he thought would give him good training. Before our match, we had many discussions about each location and what would be best for our family. We ranked the 11 programs together and matched at our first choice. There were a few programs that we did consider more prestigious than others on our list. However, we decided the following considerations were more important to our family than attending a prestigious program.
proximity to family
The closest family we had to us during our medical school years were an eight hour drive away from us. Two of our children were born during those years, we would have loved more family support. However, it was difficult for us and our family members to travel or visit one another. I’ve been told it takes a village to raise a child and I really wanted my family to be my village during my husband’s residency.
Housing Options
After living in a townhome complex without a yard and a growing family, we decided a home with a backyard was desperately wanted. We researched our housing options based off location and resident salary each program provided.
cost of living
We knew we would be living on a tight budget after learning each residency’s annual salary. Cost of living in each city was something we really considered in order to make our future budget livable for a family. We had researched prices of housing, groceries, gas along with commute times to work. We looked into what program benefits were included like physician lounges with meals and relocation moving allowances.
a Child-friendly city
We researched how many parks, zoos, children’s museums, aquariums, libraries, hiking trails, schools, etc. each city had. This was what our definition of child-friendly entailed. We ranked cities that had these things higher than others.
weather
My husband and I have mainly lived in hot, dry climates most of our lives. While living in Reno, Nevada we experienced a couple heavy winters. One winter storm caused us to lose power for two and a half days. It was so cold and all of our refrigerated food was wasted. Cold snowy days also made for us being indoors most of the winter, which is not fun with young children. We ranked programs with more fair weather higher than others.
Conclusion
I believe that a medical residency rank list should be made together with a medical student and their family because it affects everyone when a move is involved. We considered these things important to us when deciding which programs we would like to move to for my husband’s training. We’re grateful with our first choice and where we are living thus far.
