A tale of two Match Days
Drs. Joshua Landy and Sharon Vorona from Figure 1 share their Match Day experiences
Share your Match Day experience on Figure 1 here »
Match Day: The end result of a grueling four-year training period in medical school. Students apply and rank for residency programs, hoping they’ll match with their top choice. The pressure is immense — there is no guarantee they’ll match anywhere, let alone their preferred program. With so much hanging in the balance, even the most optimistic students can be found imagining their worst-case scenario. We asked two doctors on the Figure 1 team to share their Match Day experience.
Dr. Joshua Landy’s Match Day
Figure 1 co-founder Dr. Joshua Landy didn’t imagine his worst-case scenario. But he experienced it.
Surprise #1: Instead of getting matched close to home, like he had hoped, Dr. Landy found out he was moving across the country.
Surprise #2: “I called my girlfriend to tell her about it, and thought this was something we could talk about,” says Dr. Landy. Instead, his girlfriend broke up with him.
Rest assured, this story has a happy ending — though it didn’t seem like it would at the time. Dr. Landy remembers thinking that Match Day was the worst day of his entire medical school experience, and wouldn’t appreciate it for months to come. He now views the move as the best thing that could have happened.
“Professionally, I feel like I became a new person. I think about that experience as being one of the most pivotal in my life,” says Dr. Landy.
Outside of his comfort zone and far away from his friends and family, Dr. Landy gained a new sense of independence and built an entirely new network. Without hesitation, he describes his residency experience as “incredible.”
His top piece of advice to Match Day applicants is this: “If you get results that you’re not anticipating, it could actually turn out to be something important and great in your life. It’s the start of a new adventure. You might even get a new girlfriend.”
Happy ending: Dr. Landy is a practicing critical care specialist, co-founder of Figure 1, and happily married.
Dr. Sharon Vorona’s Match Day
Dr. Sharon Vorona, British physician and Figure 1 Medical Director, wasn’t always the resilient professional she is today. Back in medical school, she was an incredibly cautious student. When marks were posted publicly on a bulletin board for everyone to see, she often went home to check her marks privately.
“I didn’t want to be around anyone if I failed,” she admits.
For her residency application, Dr. Vorona practiced the same level of discretion she did with all other tests. She was at work when the results arrived, so she drove all the way home to log in. Dr. Vorona had ranked General Practice in London, England as her first choice, partially because she wanted to be near her family. The thought of being away from them was daunting.
“I realized that I had been fortunate enough to get into the program that I wanted, in the place that I wanted,” she says.
Having felt the pressures of intense medical training and exams, Dr. Vorona has a few words of advice for medical students anxiously awaiting their Match Day results:
“I can tell you, everything works out in the end, even though sometimes it seems like it won’t, it will. And good luck.”
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