What do you need?

[Cleave]

Ranking residencies required both my husband and me to think really hard about what we needed. City vs rural? Texas vs. Michigan? Near family? Near friends? I was surprised in the process to find out that I could live without a lot of things for residency as long as there was a master's swim team in the place we landed. I need swimming for stress release and wasn't willing to live without it. It was a surprise. And it made me wonder if other people were surprised by discovering what they needed in this whole residency/med school/match/attendinghood mayhem...What did you need? Did anything surprise you?

[diggitydot]

Nothing really surprised me. I don't really "need" anything specific other than to be left the hell alone. I'm pretty good anywhere, that way.

[ladymoreta]

The top of my list was being close to our families (within a few hours). We didn't have to worry about getting too rural, since DH is in anesthesia, and they don't usually operate at the little hospitals. We're in a pretty small town, though, just not as rural as the ones we grew up in.

[spotty_dog]

For residency? It was just three years, and I was expecting a baby which pretty much consumed my attention. I honestly think I would have been okay anywhere, but reasonable cost of living turned out to be a huge benefit, and I was glad to land farther west than Ohio. Our #1 and #2 were Oregon and Tennessee, you can't get much more disparate. (We matched somewhere around #6 or 7, in a location we never ever wanted to live, but it grew on us and it was the perfect training program for DH.)

For the attending job, expecting to be here for quite a few years if not forever, we needed to be back in the Northwest. Non-negotiable, 7 years away was long enough. I'd have liked some prospects to continue my own education, maybe a few more educational opportunities for the kids, but we traded that stuff for a semi-rural lifestyle that suits us pretty well.

[GreyhoundsRUs]

Our rank list was purely based on what programs DH wanted to go to. He didn't apply to any big cities since they were cost-prohibitive for us (yes, there are ways to do it, etc, but we weren't interested in 5 years of scraping). Fellowship is the same, except we are including big cities because it's only a year. We have started thinking about what we need for "the job", but it's not much (basically a mid-sized town within a couple hours of a big city, with Catholic schools).


Wife of a PGY-4 Orthopod

[Sheherezade]

Sidewalks and local businesses. That was my non negotiable. I'm a city girl at heart and for training that was easy. Lots of programs in cities. For "the job" and with kids in school, we were looking at good school districts and *gasp* suburbs. It freaked me out. I hate the idea of NEEDING a car. I need to be able to use my feet to get everything I need for basic survival. Luckily, we were able to find that in a small town with good schools and a Main Street feel.

I was also interested to see what my needs actually boiled down to....

Great question!

[Cleave]

Sidewalks and local businesses. That was my non negotiable. I'm a city girl at heart and for training that was easy. Lots of programs in cities. For "the job" and with kids in school, we were looking at good school districts and *gasp* suburbs. It freaked me out. I hate the idea of NEEDING a car. I need to be able to use my feet to get everything I need for basic survival. Luckily, we were able to find that in a small town with good schools and a Main Street feel.

I was also interested to see what my needs actually boiled down to....

Great question!

I get that. When we started all this, I jokingly told my husband I needed to live within 20 minutes of a movie theater that showed foreign films. Not that I needed to see said films, but that the theater was emblematic of all the things I wanted. Which is to say that I like the city. But when it came down to brass tacks, I was willing to move someplace a little smaller -- the non-negotiable piece turned out to be masters swimming, even for the handful of residency years (especially for the handful of stressful residency years)...

[medpedspouse]

I need culture/diversity - to live in a place where others do not look like me and may not even believe the same things that I do. I am actually living in a town 1/3 of the size of the last town but I have already met so many people from different parts of the country/world. This has taught me that town size does not matter as long as there is some diversity. Everything else, I pretty much go with the flow...medicine has taught me that. My list of must haves is no longer as long.

[corn poffi]

A job.

[Thirteen]

He wanted to stay in-state, because I was attending grad school (and vice versa). We didn't explicitly say it, but we both thought it and acted accordingly.
You could do a lot worse than live in California.


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[mommax3]

DH found out he was selected for a military residency before I even considered coming up with a list. Our military payback location taught me that I need to be within an hour of a major metropolitan area. We are currently in a very small town, ~40 minutes from downtown Indy, with suburbs to the east of us and rural life to the west, and I love it. We were in one of the suburbs when we first moved here, and it was not a good fit for us.

[GrayMatterWife]

I just "needed" for DH to match at the very best program possible. He got a great residency and, as a pleasant surprise, it was a great place to live.

[Pollyanna]

Hmmm, this is a great question. I'm not sure I needed anything in particular at the time. We chose to stay close to home because my dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's so I guess at that point I needed to stay close to my folks.

[SoonerTexan]

I don't know if I'm really sure yet!

Being near family is really the biggest, so staying in the same place is a priority.

Before I would have said mid-size to large city, but I'm starting to consider that cost of living is probably more important. One program I initially made faces at is starting to sound better because the training is good and COL is low, and puts us within 2 hours of each family.

I cant do really crazy heat, though. Dallas is my limit. No Arizona, no Florida, and I'm not thrilled about Houston. It really means a lot of to me!

[bokelley]

We were in the height of radiology being crazy competitive...honestly we just wanted to match. We applied to everything I think and took pretty much every interview offered.

Fellowship will be probably the same. Although since we are doing two I would love for them to be in the same place and somewhere warm!