Thoughts on Moving

So, as Match Day is approaching I have been thinking more and more about moving. For those of you not familiar with how medical students end up in a residency program after graduation, here’s a quick explanation: The students apply for residency programs and then wait to get invitations for interviews. After interviews are over, each student makes a rank list of all the programs they interviewed with in order of preference, and turns in their lists in February. Each residency program also ranks the students that they interviewed. Then a computer takes all the lists and uses an algorithm to match every graduating student in the country with a residency program. Ideally, a competitive student would get their top choice, but many get one lower down on their list. So, on March 20th all the students come in and each one gets their name called and goes up to get an envelope that contains the results of the match. And that is a contract (you have to go at least for the first year, and you are expected to stay with that program for the remainder of the residency).

So, it is a very interesting time right now, while we wait for Match Day. We have quite a few choices of where to go, and most of them are very good programs that would be good places for Michael to do his residency. We are pretty confident that we will match somewhere, but we’re really not sure which program we are likely to match with. So, being in innate planner that I am, I have a bunch of different questions and thoughts all running through my mind about all the places that we might possibly end up:

• We are going to have to figure out all the stuff for school for Kolby wherever we go. We really aren’t old enough to have a kid old enough to be starting school, are we?
• If we went to Texas, I’ve heard we could afford a house, but would we be able to sell it without a problem when we leave after residency?
• If we went to Pennsylvania, how would it be living in a small town? We could do lots of outdoor things, except when it’s too cold in the winter. But we could also take trips and do all the East Coast stuff.
• How are we going to get wherever we go? We have the van and the car – and driving separately on a long move doesn’t really appeal to me. Is it worth it to take that car with us, or should we just sell it to yet another medical student? But we don’t really want a car payment at this point if we can help it.
• What if we happened to end up in New York City, how would we be able to afford to live there? But wouldn’t it be so cool to live near all those great sites in the histories of our country and our church?
• How is it going to be to move into a normal family ward after being here with all the other student families who are in our same situation? Are we going to be the only young family in the ward? Will we be the busiest/noisiest/wildest family in the ward with all our little boys?
• How humid is it in north-central Florida? Would the humidity be better than living someplace with a really cold winter? We could take a day trip to the beach. :)
• What kind of insurance coverage are we going to have, and how will I figure that all out?
• What if we went to San Diego for a year? There are so many things I would love about that. We would be with family, save money on rent for a down payment on a house, and be able to enjoy the beautiful weather there. Where would we put our furniture and the things we wouldn’t need there?
• If we move someplace for a transition year before the derm residency starts – it will take a lot of effort to get to know everyone and unpack and get settled in, just to pick up and move again a year later.
• Rochester, New York would be amazing, but cold. But when are we ever going to have a chance again to live on the East Coast?
• Wouldn’t it be cool to have a house and a yard? I could decorate and we could plant a garden and the kids could play in the yard. But we are pretty ignorant about buying a house – how will we figure all that out? We would have to buy all the big appliances and worry about maintenance and upkeep.
• What kinds of things are there to do in Ohio? I bet it would be similar there to Milwaukee.
• Maybe our van would actually run ok if we moved to someplace warm – it runs fine in the summer here, but in the cold winter weather it frequently needs to be jumped and lately has started to kill sometimes when we stop at traffic lights, even though we have replaced the battery several times and no mechanic can figure out the problem. We’ll see.
• Salt Lake would mean we could live in my grandma’s finished basement (which is larger than our current apartment), and save up money for a house. But the transition year there said their interns are busier at the hospital than some other programs – it would probably be ok, but Michael’s going to be gone enough as it is, so would I really want him to be more busy than he might somewhere else?
• Tonight the temperature here in Milwaukee is in the negatives. Just about any place would have to have a better climate than this, right? :) Too bad for the winters here – otherwise Milwaukee would be a rather nice place to live.
• How are we ever going to find friends as good as the ones here?
• I feel like there are so many things to be thinking about, and I am just scratching the surface. I wonder what else there is to figure out that I haven’t even thought of yet. I just have to keep myself from really thinking about it too much, since I can’t do anything but wait at this point.

I am excited about starting out someplace new, but at the same time I am feeling rather sad that we will likely be leaving our friends here in Milwaukee and will not see many of them again. This is an exciting time for us coming up, so it will be really interesting to see how it all turns out.