patients. He left the PhD program after completing that year, and I think that realization greatly influenced his desire to become a family medicine doctor. Dave: We started out in the same class. I had taken a test that the AAMC puts out that tells you what specialties in medicine you might be interested in, and family medicine was one of them, so I joined the family medicine interest group (FMIG). I think maybe some of the first times we talked, it was in the FMIG. But the truth is we were friends before we started dating. About halfway through second year, we started dating, and then I left at the end of second year for a year of research with the PhD program. I knew pretty quickly that I didn’t want to stay in research, so I left. It did mean that Julia was now a year ahead of me, so we had to figure out a creative solution to that. The Process of Matching as a Couple Julia: Since Dave and I were separated by a year, that got tricky. I considered several different “solutions” to see if we could eventually couples match together. I considered an MPH, a research year, but ultimately decided to pursue a Transitional Year Residency and was lucky to match nearby in Myrtle Beach, SC. Dave proposed just a few weeks before my first Match Day (I happy cried). It was a big priority for us to match in the same location, and I’m so glad I took that extra year. Dave is my best friend and my biggest support. Being in the same residency has been an amazing experience. Our faculty and co-residents are really supportive. I developed a strong interest in OB while in medical school, so knew I wanted that to be a strong component of my residency. That alone increased our desire to move out West, where programs felt more well-rounded and full-spectrum. At this point in my life, I was also ready for a bigger change, and my family had been traveling out West for vacation for years; it felt like the place I wanted to establish my career. What better time to move than in training? We looked broadly across the entire Mountain West and Pacific Northwest. Utah Valley was initially just an appealing curriculum on a website. Easily checked the boxes we were looking for. It ironically was the only interview we did where we both interviewed the same day (all virtual for us). The residency felt so unique, everyone seemed so happy, and the curriculum stood out, even after interview season, as the best fit for us. Neither of us had any family in Utah, and neither of us had ever set foot in Provo, but we were ready for adventure! Dave: Matching as a couple is a lot like matching by yourself, but with an extra layer of complexity. Instead of just ranking your own preferences, you are ranking iterations of preferences. So, you end up with rank lists that are like 100 points long. I think at one point, I calculated that if we wanted to rank everywhere that we interviewed in every possible combination, we’d have something like 350 ranks. That cost extra money, so we decided not to do that. In some ways, we had an advantage because we were both looking at family medicine. I think where it really starts to get tough is | 14
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