University of Rochester

Well I guess a lot of you are wondering how my first interview went. At least I hope you're still interested. Sorry about the delay, but....
Hmmm, I don't really have a good excuse. Oh well

So we left San Diego on a red-eye saturday night, arriving in chicago at four thirty in the morning. Why so early you ask? Cause I just knew that there was going to be trouble, and there sure was. Due to heavy fog in chicago, our flight to Rochester was canceled, and then the one we were rebooked on was also canceled. The flight we were finally confirmed on wouldn't have gotten us into Rochester until near midnight sunday night. So I whipped out my charm, did some smooth talking, and got us rebooked on a flight to philadelphia, and a subsequent flight to Rochester arriving at seven pm. whew......... and only ten hours after we were originally supposed to arrive.

So then we get there, but no luggage of course. I had carried on my garment bag containg all clothing items needed for the interview (smart thinking, eh?), so the worst case scenario would have been no makeup and bad hair. Luckily, however, our bags showed up and were delivered to the hotel sometime during the night. I got up at five, got dressed, had some coffee, went over my primary and secondary apps, and chilled out.

I arrived at the medical center at quarter to seven, and was the second person there. As people began trickling in, we must have done the "introduction circle" half a dozen times. Of eleven people interviewing that day, I was the only one from the west. A good portion of them turned out to be ivy league, and one girl was about seven months pregnant. It was a good group though, and we all got along very well during our extensive periods of waiting. We had a welcome and introduction session with the dean of admissions, and then were left to wait for our first interviews. In this case, we had to go find our interviewer's office, which was no easy task. The whole medical center and the school of medicine are housed in one giant complex, with seemingly endless hallways and color-coded elevators. Luckily for me, despite some wrong turns, I made it to my first interview on time. It was with the department head of anesthesiology (oh yeah), and everything went very smoothly. Turns out he wanted to talk about himself more than he wanted to talk about me, but whatever. Mostly the whole thing flowed like a conversation, which I take to be a good sign. He actually gave me direct feedback after the interview, which was totally cool. He said that I interviewed very well, and that he didn't make the final decisions but.......
So I take that to mean that if he was making the decisions that I would be in. Yay! When he left me, he patted me on the shoulder and told me to be a good doc.

But would my second interview go as well as the first? Well, the second guy really wanted to talk about me and not himself, so I did a hell of a lot more talking. Unfortunately, I was getting kind of exhausted at that point, and lost my train of thought not once but twice. This was in response to ten-part questions, so I don't really feel that bad about it. I just apologized and told him I was in a food coma, and we had a good laugh about that. So bottom line, I don't think it went as well as the first, but I still felt pretty good about it. Until later......

Later the doubt started to creep in. I realized that my part was completely over, and that the entire thing was out of my hands at that point. I kept thinking that sure I felt good about the interviews, but what if it wasn't good enough??? At this stage in the game, I realized, the rejection would be personal. Not based on numbers or essays, but purely personal. That kind of rejection is bound to hurt a lot more. So my initial elation started to melt away into a kind of despair. It's entirely out of my hands!!!

Yet the only thing I can do is move on, and try to put it out of my head. I have four more interviews to go, and it can only get better. It's not like the first interview really went badly, quite the contrary in fact. I guess I'm just being silly, but it is to be expected given the madness of this whole process. I head out for VCU and Dartmouth on the 18th, so keep crossing your fingers for me.