Hello and welcome back to EM Clerkship. My name is Maddie Watts and this is the last episode of our

series on applying and interviewing for emergency medicine residency. Interview season is coming to an end,

so my goal for this episode is to answer all of those lingering questions that will be plaguing your

mind between the last day of interviews until that fateful day in March.

Today we will cover three big questions.

Number one, how do I go about making my rank list?

Number two, what about post-interview communication, both from and two programs?

Number three, how does this whole thing called the match actually work?

Before we dive in, I want to say a few words about the bigger picture to hopefully

settle your nerves a little bit.

In medicine, the match is held up on a pedestal as the culmination of all of your hard work.

Given the time that you've put in up to this point, from pre-med classes to working to glean

clinical experience, to days on end studying in preclinicals to grueling hours in third and

fourth year, it's hard not to feel an immense pressure to ensure that all of that hard work has paid off.

Yes, the match is important, but in reality, all residency is your first job.

In no other field or industry is your first job given so much weight.

When I think about my friends and family that are in other fields,

almost all of them have switched jobs at least once by their late 20s. For most of them,

their first job was nothing more than a stepping stone to help gain experience and a way to pay the

rent. Even if I consider attendings at my current program, they all have such a wide array of backgrounds and residency

training experiences, and yet all of them ended up with the same academic job. The point being that

there are several ways to achieve the same end goal. There are probably several programs that

...