CaRMS in the Can

For all intents and purposes, my CaRMS application is complete. What's CaRMS, you might ask? The Canadian Residency Matching Service: a non-profit body that organizes the appointment of all Canadian medical school graduates to residency positions across the country. When you graduate from med school in Canada, though technically a physician, you must complete post-grad training in the specialty of your choice (Family Medicine - the classical "GP" is considered a specialty in Canada) - a residency. And the years keep rolling by...

After a somewhat technically complicated process that generates your electronic application, med students across the country hit the road for two weeks in January/February to interview at various programs. I interviewed for Family Medicine residencies in Calgary, Lethbridge/Medicine Hat, Red Deer and Saskatoon. 5 flights, one Holiday Inn, and 4 name tags later (relatively painless compared to what some of my colleagues go through) I'm done interviewing and my applications to the programs are in the can. The programs: two great, one far, and one ugly. All that's left now is for me to rank the 4 in order of my preference, and wait for the programs to rank me. And on one magical day in March an unknowable computer in Ontario, without parts or passions, will combine those two lists and assign me a residency position based on a complex mathematical algorithm. This, of course, fills me with warmth and a sense of well-being concerning my place in the inscrutable universe.

Not that that last step of ranking is anything near to an easy task. Where will our family end up for the next two years? Thankfully we seem to be choosing between two great possibilities. Still, this makes things almost worse, since choosing one means closing the door on the other. Ah, well - life is just so. We haven't really hit many of these crossroads in the past, or at least our path through them has seemed fairly obvious. So now we complain bitterly that we have to make a choice.

The point is, my efforts are at an end. And medical school has a ghostly 9 weeks lingering on...

And for some reason, this weekend I'm feeling a little like the gentleman at the bottom of the CaRMS website illustration, not those well-groomed, intent people near the top.