e: katie@katiescarlettbrandt.com

Four minutes. That’s all it takes for a computer to sort roughly 25,000 graduating medical students in the United States into residency programs. About 100 lives a second.

And that’s how many people waited—teeth clenched, heels tapping—for their fates to be handed to them in little white envelopes one Friday morning in March.

At the University of Chicago, 97 students—0.4 percent of the 25,000—gathered in the hospital’s P-117 at 9 a.m. on March 15 for the annual spring rite of passage. For four years they’d studied, worked, socialized and explored on these grounds, and for the past few months they’d searched for somewhere else to go.

They’d studied what programs such as Johns Hopkins, UCSF and Penn had to offer; tried to picture themselves working in clinics hundreds of miles away, not far from a beach, maybe, or a ski resort; scheduled interviews and flew to these places while simultaneously trying to manage Chicago class work; ranked the programs to which they’d applied.

And then they waited.

A month after the rank lists were due, the waiting was over. At Chicago, fourth years put on the requisite red Pritzker Match Day shirts (front: Match Madness, back: Team Pritzker 07), and approached the front of P-117 for their envelopes, ready to find out where they’d take their next step.

The adventurer

Two days after Kiera von Besser completed her undergraduate degree at Princeton in 1998, she was sitting in an anatomy class at Chicago—the first of many courses that would lead to her MD/PhD. The road trip she took to get there, though, could have been her last.

As she pulled out of a Kentucky rest stop, a drunk driver slammed into von Besser’s car. Her dad witnessed the crash from another car, watching helpless as it spun around three times on the highway. Von Besser and her mom were rushed to a nearby hospital. Everyone was OK.

The very next day, when the professor took attendance in her anatomy class, von Besser raised her hand.

Eight years later, another road trip played a decisive role in her fate. Von Besser was on a break, driving through the open desert near Moab, Utah, and listening to her music when she found the clarity of mind to rank her top residency choices.

“I wanted a bigger city in the north,” she said, but she also wanted to be closer to her South Carolina home and her dad who had just turned 70. Von Besser ended up applying to 20 programs for OB/GYN, was offered interviews at 18, accepted 14 and ranked “five or six.”

When Match Day arrived, her best friend drove in from Michigan to share the anticipation. And when her name was called for her envelope…

Penn!

"It's where I thought I was going to go,” she said. “It was my favorite program, the best fit.”

Before leaving Chicago, though, she had a few more duties to attend to: She still had to sell her place. She had to eat at a bunch of restaurants on a list she’d compiled. And she had to leave for a five-week trek in Southeast Asia (the one continent she’d never seen in person) before beginning her residency in June.

The newlyweds

Fourth-year medical students Laura Han and Patrick Lang tied the knot three days before their rank lists were due; they’d been married just 30 days when Match Day hit. “We didn’t want to wedding-plan after the match, so we moved it up,” Han said.

The wedding wasn’t the only thing they did early. After two years of saying “hi” to each other in passing, the two started dating and, in just a few months, discussing marriage. Those discussions included their “couples match,” in which couples rank programs together and the computer program factors in their relationship.

“It’s a very maturing process, constantly having to think of the other person,” Han said. When they were choosing their programs, they took their specialties into account, as well as their families: his in Connecticut, hers in California.

Then, on the Monday before Match Day, Han and Lang received a call from the Dean’s Office. There’d been a setback. As sometimes happens, one of them—Lang—had matched at UCSF; Han had not.

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