It looked like New Year’s. Fireworks, a giant clock, drunk people. What it was was Match Day.

The night before St. Patrick’s Day, my sister wasn’t sleeping much. She went to bed at 1 am and got up at 6, when she immediately dove into her collection. Movie after movie, she didn’t allow herself time to think. She refused. Early in the afternoon, she left to meet some of her friends from school at a bar. Mimosas were the order of the day, and lots of them. In a few years they would be surgeons, physical therapists, and pediatricians, but for the moment, getting drunk was crucial. A week ago, they had given up control of their lives. In a few minutes, they would know the future.

Match Day at Northwestern Medical School is surreal. Hundreds of students, a month and a half away from graduation, gather in one spot, surrounded by their peers, teachers, and deans past and present. There is food, but few people have a calm enough stomach to eat. At the specified time, each student files toward a row of tables, where they receive an envelope with their name on it, sealed with a green sticker, and a pull-tab firecracker. Once every envelope is given out, the crowd, as one, looks skyward to the giant clock, ten seconds to zero.

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For the past few months, the med students have been visiting hospitals around the country. For Ann, it was a whirlwind tour of Colorado, Oregon, California, and Wisconsin. They spend about a week at each hospital, meeting people, asking and being asked questions, and evaluating the hospital, staff, residency program, and surrounding area to see if they could spend the next three to five years of their lives there. When they’re done, they have to choose at least three programs, sorted by preference, and enter them into a computer network. Hospital administrators do the same, choosing the students they want to have in their program. After that, it’s out of anyone’s hands.

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The med students wait with their eyes to the heavens and their fingers poised underneath the flap of the envelope, ready to break the seal. When the clock strikes zero, the MC announces that the students may open their envelopes, but by the time he finishes, everyone is pulling out his or her letter. It’s only in this moment that the room is silent. In the next, people find out either that they have matched and have a place to go, or they have not, and they have to join what’s called the Scramble where students call and apply to hospitals that still have openings. It’s mostly blank beneath the school’s letterhead, but there, on the middle of the page, my sister reads in bold print: “Congratulations Ann Davies, you have matched!” My sister cries because the hospital that she matched with was her first choice, and her best friend Jess cries because the hospital is in Fort Collins, Colorado.

My sister calls her husband, who had to fly to Colorado on 12 hours’ notice to take an exam for a job, but the message she leaves is just the screaming and crying of the med students, and the popping of firecrackers. She doesn’t tell him their hopes were confirmed, and that he can take the job if offered. She hugs Jess, and goes back to her place where I’ll arrive shortly to give her a hug and take her out to the House of Blues, where Kurt will meet us and give her a kiss, before going to the Rusted Root concert where she’ll spend the night dancing underneath the bright lights and loud music.