Match Day: One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors

Three new doctors—all women—struggle to balance professional ambitions and personal relationships, triumphs and crises, uncertainties and decisions, through one pressure-packed day and the first year of their careers in medicine

Each year, on the third Thursday in March, more than 15,000 graduating medical students exult, despair, and endure Match Day: the decision of a controversial computer algorithm, which matches students with hospital residencies in every field of medicine. The match determines where each graduate will be assigned the crucial first job as an intern, and shapes the rest of his—or, in increasing number, her—life.
In Match Day, Brian Eule follows three women from the anxious months before the match through the completion of their first year of internship. Each woman makes mistakes, saves lives, and witnesses death; each must keep or jettison the man in her life; each comes to learn what it means to heal, to comfort, to lose, and to grieve, while maintaining a professional demeanor.
Just as One L became the essential book about the education of young attorneys, so Match Day will be for every medical student, doctor, and reader interested in medicine: a guide to what to expect, and a dramatic recollection of a pressured, perilous, challenging, and rewarding time of life.

BRIAN EULE is a graduate of Stanford University and received an MFA in writing from Columbia University. He has worked as a journalist for two Massachusetts newspapers, as well as contributing to Stanford Magazine. He lives with his wife in Northern California.