Dusty officially started his fourth year of medical school this past August! woohoo! Getting our family to this point in the journey has been quite taxing and crazy… to say the least, but we did it!
We spent most of August living in Rochester, Minnesota where Dusty participated in an away rotation at Mayo Clinic. It was a great experience and we enjoyed the city a lot! Rochester has some really fantastic parks and amazing walking and biking paths. On one particular day, we drove to the Mississippi River that separates Wisconsin and Minnesota and the drive was beautiful – I wish the photos I took could do it justice.
Below are a handful of questions I get asked often about where we are in the process of medical school – hopefully, this will help catch everyone up.
What We Are Doing Right Now
In the last week or so, Dusty has been around A LOT more than usual, which has been wonderful. He’s able to help a lot with Rowan which allows me to catch up on blog and volunteering stuff that I enjoy doing. It also gives our family some wonderful down time together that we’ve really missed this past year due to Dusty’s crazy study schedule. It’s also nice that we can go through the days and weeks without worrying about a major test or exam looming over his head.
What We Have Coming Up Next
In the last week or two Dusty submitted his application to residency programs across the country (but mainly in the midwest). He’ll be traveling for interviews here and there from mid-October through December and then we’ll have a nice and more low key holiday and new year. In March, we’ll “match” which means we’ll find out which residency program Dusty has been accepted to. This process will be a bit intense as we basically go to a dinner with other medical students in Dusty’s school and everyone sits at tables and opens an envelope all at the same time that says where we will be going. It sort of feels like the hunger games -or so we’ve been told. We could end up anywhere! It’s a little nervewracking…and the wait and unknown of where we might live in the future is definitely a bit harder than I anticipated. If we do move, we would some time at the end of May. There is a possibility we could end up staying though! We just don’t know 🙂
What Area of Medicine Dusty Wants to Practice
Dusty has a strong interest in family medicine and is interested in doing a family medicine residency and following it with a sports medicine fellowship. A family medicine residency is three years long and a sports medicine fellowship is one year. So four years total after this 🙂 whew! Almost there!