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Match made in Medical school
Seconds before they open their envelopes.
PHOTOS BY BRUCE POWELL
Fourth-year students enter the couples match hoping it’s not ’til residency do they part BY EILEEN NORRIS
H
olly J. Humphrey, then a fourth-year medical student, could feel the tension in the auditorium. She and her classmates at the Pritzker School of Medicine were waiting to hear where they would be accepted for residency training. For Humphrey, this was professional, but it was also personal. Her husband was a medical student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They were about to learn if the next several years would be spent together or apart. uchospitals.edu/midway
She opened her envelope: The University of Chicago, her first choice. She hurried to a telephone and paged her husband, Duane Follman. “I think I got him on the first try,” she said. They were ecstatic: He had matched at the University of Chicago, too. “You have the worst-case scenario in your mind,” Follman said recently. “We were newly married, so there were a lot of implications if we didn’t get into the same program at the same institution. We would have never seen each other. By the grace of God, we did. It was surreal. I was
Molly Naunheim, MS4, and Kevin Choo, MS4, matched together at the University of California, San Francisco.
still pinching myself two days later. There weren’t very many couples matching in those days, but we took a risk and it worked for us.” That was 1983. Humphrey is now the Ralph W. Gerard Professor in Medicine and dean for medical education at Pritzker. Follman, MD, is a cardiologist in Hinsdale, Ill. For new physicians, Match Day continues to be an anxious time. The match process can be enormously stressful, but it’s even more tense for couples who want to Continued on page 26 MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY
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