Match Day finally arrived. Congratulations, you matched! Now what are you supposed to do next? We talked with current residents and physicians to find out what they wish they’d done before residency started. Here are some tips we put together on a few items to check off your To-Do list before residency starts this summer. 1. Connect with your new crew. Now that you know where you will be spending your residency, you probably have a thousand questions running through your head. Where will you live? Where will you find decent coffee in the middle of the night? Do residents ever have time to go for Happy Hour? To get answers, go to the source: current program residents and alums. They were in your shoes, and they probably have tips for navigating your new residency. 2. Goodbye school, hello debt. The average medical school graduate has $176,000 of student debt. Yikes, that’s a lot of dough. And since you are finally saying goodbye to med school, and hello to a real job with a (albeit small) paycheck, now is a good time to look at how you are going to repay your loans. You may have the option of deferring payment on those loans while you’re a resident. Or income-based repayment may make more sense, since you probably expect to earn a higher salary after residency. 3. Spend wisely, young doctor. Now is a good time to spend your new income wisely. You may have mountains of debt, but extreme penny pinching probably isn’t going to impact that much one way or the other. So spend a little… just don’t go crazy with it. And by the way, this may not be the best time to buy a house. That’s a big debt to take on, plus a house may lock you into a location too soon. Plus, with your on-call hours, you’ll never be able to wait at home for the plumber to show up! 4. Don’t forget those textbooks! Once you figure out where you are going to live during residency, you will need to get all your stuff from here to there… like all those super-heavy medical textbooks weighing down your bookshelf. 5. Get your paperwork in order. Along with getting a digital fax line, it’s a good time to get the rest of your clerical life under control as well. Do that filing you’ve been putting off. Make copies of key documents, like your diploma. Pro tip: set up auto-forwarding from your medical school email address to your personal email address, so you don’t miss out on any important emails post graduation. Since you won’t be able to use your medical school email address for much longer, make sure you switch your login email addresses for important online accounts to a more permanent email address. 6. Last call for a break. Now that you matched, you may be coming down with a case of “senioritis”. This is perfectly normal, and the symptoms should subside by the time your residency starts! This may be the last hurrah for a little while, so take advantage of the next couple of months to just cruise and have a little fun. Travel. Catch up with family & friends. Pick up a hobby. Take care of yourself – before you start your residency to do the real work of taking care of others. Source
