Each year, medical students across the country count down to annual “Match Day,” which marks one of the most important days in a student's career. Friday, March 18, they will come together with their classmates and wait for the envelope that will tell them where they are headed for their residency training. This year for our annual Match Day blog series, we're taking a different approach: Rebekah Lucien will share her first full post with us, but continue the posts over on Philly.com, where she will blog about her thoughts leading up to and after this major stepping stone.
After living in Northern
California my whole life, I moved to Philadelphia for medical school, eager to expand my horizons. On my second day here, two African American men delivering my new furniture looked at my driver’s license, and exclaimed, “Why did you come all the way here?” I told them about the training opportunities I hoped to have at the Perelman School of Medicine and my desire to serve and learn from the diverse Philadelphia community. Their immense pride in Penn Medicine was evident through their smiles, and their excitement at seeing an African American female entering the medical field was the perfect welcome to the city. They shouted, "Bye, Dr. Lucien," as they left.
Four years later, I am reaching the culmination of an incredible, challenging journey to an MD degree and applying for residency in Pediatrics with the support of my new teammate and fiancé Sean. He grew up in South Jersey, where he and his parents currently reside, and is open to living anywhere as long as it’s an urban environment with technological job opportunities. I want to be no more than a short plane ride from family, so I limited our search to the Northeast and West Coast, with little in between. My story has two sides, which I selectively highlighted based on the program's location. On the East Coast, I’m comfortable. Here, I have college friends who moved, med school friends wanting to stay, and my fiancé’s family and friends. On the West Coast, I have my parents, siblings, extended family, and more friends. It would be nice to see them more frequently, and yes, return to better weather.
As I interviewed bicoastally, I was surprised to see more similarities than differences between residency programs, thanks to standardization of training by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The differences were also more experiential: small class vs. large, feel of the program, supplemental offerings, call schedule, etc. Even when I identified the differences, I had difficulty deciding which I actually preferred. Instead of making ranking decisions analytically, I tried to best answer the question, “What would my life look like here?”
At every program I visited, I tried to find the residents who were living different aspects of my future and learn from their experiences. Did they have excellent adolescent medicine mentorship? Time for community engagement? How comfortable did they feel balancing marriage with residency? Did they feel supported as underrepresented minorities in the program?
These personal anecdotes helped me shape an image of myself at each place and figure out how happy I'd be training there. My fiancé and I also considered job opportunities for him, cost of living, and how easily each location would allow us to visit the in-laws. After months of interviews, long discussions with mentors and each other, we created a final rank order list in early February. We are excited about any of our top choices, which are still evenly split on each side of the country.
On February 24, graduating medical students across the country submitted their rank order lists and surrendered our preferences to the Match algorithm. For now, we all wait first, to find out if we matched, then, on March 18 via a sealed envelope, find out where. My fiancé and I are at peace, trusting that we'll end up exactly where we need to be. I came to medical school simply looking for a great education in a new environment, and I'll be graduating with life-long friends and mentors, unforgettable patient experiences, and a husband. Only time will tell what adventures and growth will be in store for us over the next three years, so we're excited to go wherever the Match leads us. In the meantime, we'll keep ourselves very busy with planning our California wedding less than two months away.
My best wishes to my fellow classmates and all graduating medical students as we await Match Day!
Rebekah graduated from Stanford University in 2012 with a BA in Human Biology and a self-designed concentration in Development from Girl to Woman. Whether writing Valentine's Day cards for her pediatric patients or journal entries about memorable patient encounters, Rebekah continually finds ways to express her love of writing during medical school. In her free time, she loves baking, binge watching shows on Netflix, and taking salsa lessons with her fiancé.