Internet has been sparse down here in Harlingen, but I’m tough.. I’m surviving… Barbara found out that she has been accepted into a residency program somewhere, but the question is *which* program. It works like this:

The NRMP ( National Resident Matching Program ) controls who gets into a residency program and who does not. To get in, you interview at a bunch of schools and then rank them in your order of preference. At the same time, the school ranks you on the basis of how much they want you. This info all gets tossed into a computer that decides your fate for the next 4 years or so. Pretty sweet right? It gets better. After the computer does it’s thing, they email everyone simultaneously telling them if they have been matched to a program or if they did not match. (This is where we are at now as we know barbara got in *somewhere*) If you didn’t match, then you have to “scramble” which entails calling schools all over the nation trying to find one that didn’t fill all its spots. You could end up anywhere in the US, and its most likely you will end up somewhere you don’t want to be.

Tomorrow we find out if Barbara gets into Vanderbilt, or if Claire will have to write nasty things about them in the paper. I like my school, so I hope that we don’t have to resort to public defamation. I’m not above it though. So one more request for good juju.