The Residency Application Game...

So, on September 2nd, I began playing the exciting residency application game.  It only costs a few hundred dollars to play and it's really fun.  You get to fill out a really neat survey about yourself, write a page-long essay about how great you are, and then ask three or more doctors to also write letters about how amazingly wonderful you are.  You also get to send your grades and board scores from the past three and a half years out to everyone so they can see everything you have ever accomplished (or failed to accomplish).  Honestly, I don't understand why more people don't do this.  It's great.

Well, all joking aside, it all became much more real to me today because I got my first invitation to interview!  This morning I was just sitting in clinic and decided to check my email and was surprised by an invitation from the pediatrics program in Omaha.  It totally caught me off guard because I wasn't expecting invitations for another couple weeks.  It seems much more real now and I'm getting excited to start interviewing.  I am definitely ready to finish up fourth year and move on to an actual job where I feel like I'm making a difference and contributing to a team.  I'm also very excited to hone in on Pediatrics, which is really the only field of medicine which I have ever cared to learn about.  It will be nice to be done with all the "other stuff" and move on to learning everything I can to be a good pediatrician.  Anyway, it made for an exciting morning and I hope there are more invitations to come.