Home sweet home! Yes, I am at last sitting in my very own apartment reflecting on the interview period that I can now officially refer to in the past tense. It is now time for us all to cast our votes.
As of February 5th, the national ranking period has been officially open, providing both the programs and the applicants a three-week window to rank one another. As far as the programs are concerned, I feel they have a slight advantage; not because deciding between so many qualified candidates is easy, but simply because it is something that they have been doing year-in, and year-out, since the beginning of CaRMS. For us however, this is a first. Although we have colleagues who have been through process in years past to talk to, it has become quite evident that the way in which we choose a program is as individual a process as that of choosing a specialty in the first place. Indeed, there is no magic formula; no right or wrong answer.
What have I come up with? As previously mentioned throughout the blog, I am somebody that makes decisions very much on instinct. I do take the time to weigh out the variables, but most of the time, I go with my gut. That being said, for a decision of this magnitude, that approach seemed rather cavalier. I decided to reflect upon the components of a residency program that were most important to me. I then assigned each of those components a numerical value of 5 or 10 based on their degree of importance. The list included such things as: opportunities to be involved in education, support for research, opportunity for international electives, resident well being etc.
In addition to rating the programs, it is also important to rate the city. Although not permanent, the city to which we match will be home for a minimum of three years. As a single guy in his mid-twenties (i.e. me), I also realize that these three years are not just any three years, but could very well be the years that define my personal life going forward. As such, the city in which I live is not something that I feel inclined to take lightly. I therefore decided to incorporate this into my rating scale, on a scale of 15.
Finally, I felt that I would not be true to myself if I didn’t allow my gut feeling to exert any control over my ultimate decision. Therefore, I assigned each program a score out of 10, which was based entirely on my instinctual feeling about each program. Once I added it all up, I had a scoring system that gave me a value out of 100 for each and every program that I visited.
How did it all work out? Well, I can say with certainty that my apple analogy stood strong. In the 75 possible points to be awarded for the programs themselves, the highest score was a 66 and the lowest a 62. They all ranked very differently in each of the individual components, but at the end of the day, the differences in the strengths of the programs were almost negligible. As far as the cities go, it turns out that Canada is a very beautiful country. Although each city offered a very different living environment, and culture, in almost all cases, I was able to find very strong arguments to support my potential happiness in each of the communities. And last but not least, I got to my ‘gut-feeling.’ It is here where the biggest variability existed between the programs, and it appears that once again, my instinct will ultimately guide my decision.
My process has thus come to an end. I will have my answer in three weeks time and until then; I can only hope to keep my body and mind occupied. I will not pretend that the wait isn’t grueling and that it is not important to me that I land in the places that I have put at the top of my list, but I do take comfort in the fact that I think I can be happy no matter where I land up. And when push comes to shove, that is all any of us really want.