Day 1

I consider today the first day of my residency, and to commemorate, I am starting a new blog category dedicated to recording my experiences and thoughts as I go through the next 3 years, more as a journal than anything.

Today at 10am I found out that I matched to a residency. I find out Friday March 21st 2025 where I matched.

But I am getting ahead of myself... Actually I am just starting in medias res.

A little context for this whole thing. I started my road to medicine the first day of college a UPenn 2006. Unsure of what I wanted to do with my life I defaulted to pre-med since I loved science and was good with people. After the second week of classes, and seeing the almost complete consumption of time the concentration demanded I switched majors. "I am not going to spend my college years this way!" I remember distinctly saying to myself.

So I continued for the rest of my college path in Cognitive Neuroscience. I loved this major and was able to learn about science as well as play SPRINT football be extremely active in my Fraternity and have the college experience I wanted.

After college I had plans to look into going the PhD route and worked in a lab for 2 years. After deciding that this was not the path for me, I resigned and moved out to LA to be a beach bum for 3 months. After an amazing period, I realized I had to get my career going and decided that medicine was my calling. To pursue it, in quick secession I enrolled in a 1 year post bacc program at LMU (2012-2013), did a 1 year Masters in Physiology program (referred to as the SMP) at Georgetown (2013-2014) during my gap year, did medicals school at GW (2014-2018) and started an Emergency Medicine Residency at GW (2018-2019).

This is where things went a little sideways. During the course of that gauntlet of education I got married and had 3 kids. It was clear in early 2019 that the most important things to me in life were falling apart and I needed to address them. There will undoubtedly be multiple posts that revisit this time, but suffice it to say, I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time and decided to withdraw from the residency program after successfully completing the first year of training.

After that I was a stay at home dad until COVID hit 8 months later. I became a lead teacher for 1 academic year for a Montessori Pod for 13 kids in our neighborhood, which was one of the best experiences of my life. After that year I returned to be a stay at home dad until I felt the calling to return to medicine. I started my own longevity/lifestyle medicine practice in 2022, and after developing it for several years as an adjunct to primary care, realized that to practice the kind of medicine I wanted to be practicing that I needed to return, finish my residency, and be a fully comprehensive primary care/longevity medicine/lifestyle medicine doctor.

And so here we are...

Having reapplied I am now back into a 3 year residency program. I applied to 3 programs/2 schools. They were GW's Internal Medicine Primary Care Program, GW's Internal Medicine Program, and Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic States Internal Medicine Program. And will find out which of those 3 programs I have been accepted to this coming Friday.

Two notable things about the application process as a very non traditional applicant. I genuinely felt warmth and support from mentors I had from my past in medicine. They gave great advice and helped me make this dream a reality. Secondly, most programs would not entertain looking at someone's application if they were more than 3 years removed from medical school.

Well. I think that is enough for now... More stories to follow.