location lottery

+ In California in November, Zach described an aspect of the whole med school/law school process very accurately - while Jake and I have very strong preferences and ideas about where it is that we want to be living for the next 4 years, there's an aspect of the application process that is amazing, because it's a location lottery, basically! Obviously, odds are that we'll end up in a pretty normal place, perhaps even one where one of us has lived before (Michigan, New York, San Francisco, not that I've heard a word from UCSF yet), but I am totally floored by the idea of ending up in a place that I would otherwise have no reason to go, like Duke in North Carolina.

+ Which leads me to my upcoming trip. I fly out of Sweden in one week, for my interview at Duke. Then I go to Michigan for my interview there. Aside from Jake being from Ann Arbor and me being obsessed with it in a Dexter, Washtanaw Dairy, front porch kind of way, my grandfather also went to medical school there. That's cool. Then, to Columbia! My alma mater, or "alma monster" as someone recently joked. Maybe they're just giving me an interview so that I feel like I had a fair shot and that they respect me so that in the future I'll give them loads of money, but whatever. I'll take it. And, last but not least, UC San Diego, which is a weird one since there isn't a decent law school in San Diego. It doesn't seem realistic to a) make Jake commute to UCLA two hours each direction or b) make Jake, who will likely have his choice of top 10 law schools, go to a school that will be limiting for him. I am going to withdraw my application from Iowa, I will be interested to get my letter from USC soon, I will keep an open mind about pursuing Brown even though there's the same issue with no law school in Providence and Jake having to commute to Boston or New Haven probably, and Cornell blew my mind but I don't understand how we could go back to New York right now and be happy in the same way.

+ This whole process is insane, applying to med school. I sort of knew what I was getting myself into, but not really. I'm about to have 11 discrete flights, but at least this time it will be over the course of 2 weeks, not 1. I've been hanging out with a bunch of people who recently graduated from med school here in Sweden, and the process is completely different. I'm exaggerating slightly, but basically you click a button to apply to med school here. If you have the top grades, you will be considered, lottery-style, at the school you choose. If you don't have sufficient grades to apply that way, there's a different route that does involve writing an essay and having interviews with a doctor/professor and a psychiatrist. There are 9 million people in all of Sweden, which makes the process fundamentally different than in a place like the US, but it makes me think of some of those bootstrap decision making process theories in psychology. I mean, despite American med schools' best efforts to truly evaluate candidates holistically, as individual people, I wonder if the decisions they would make based on preliminary qualifications akin to what the Swedish programs judge on, would actually be any different than the decisions they make in the end, after reading thousands of our essays and having us spend thousands of dollars flying all over the country to interview. I'm excited for my next trip, though. I thought North Carolina would be super warm but apparently in Durham it gets down to below 20 at night sometimes! During the day in January it seems to vary between the 60s and as low as the 30s. I think it will be cold and cozy in Ann Arbor, and then I get to spend probably a whole week in Berkeley, which will include my first dress fitting at Jin Wang in San Francisco.

+ The point of this is that I have no idea where I'll end up, and this process is really horrible and gut-wrenching, but it's also exciting.