NOTE: Match Day was Friday, March 20 - and fourth-year students at the KU School of Medicine-Wichita finally found out where they will do their residencies. In this series, we follow fourth-year student Jonathan Pike on the interview trail and provide snapshots of the challenging and somewhat mysterious Match. See this spring's issue of Embark magazine for a full version of the story.

The night-before dinner is a tradition of the residency interview process. It's a chance for applicants to get the lowdown from those young doctors in the trenches, the residents.

The dinners give potential co-workers a chance to check each other out in a relaxed atmosphere outside the formality of program administrators, glass-paneled offices and sharp new black suits. And Jonathan Pike, a fourth-year student at KU School of Medicine-Wichita who will interview at eight family practice residency programs, loves these gatherings.

In Kansas City, at a nouveau Mexican resident on the Plaza, first-year resident Shane Austin juggled conversation and questions from Pike and three other candidates interviewing the next day.  Pike asks about attending physicians, obstetrics training, and the transition to residency. Casually dressed in jeans and sneakers, he is right at home, eating salsa, asking questions and carefully listening to answers.

In Salina, where Pike is interviewing for the Smoky Hill Family Medicine Residency, the night-before dinner consists of pizza, pop, spouses, babies, young children and a whopping 10 residents. There's talk of rotations, ER duty, night call, specialists ... topics both professional and personal. Pike, who finished medical school in Wichita after two years in Kansas City, knows some of the residents. Of Smoky Hill's 12 residents, nine went to KU School of Medicine, including five Wichita graduates.

Early on, Pike asks resident Krista De Witt - "Did I sit next to you in Immunology?" - and they conclude that, yes, they did have a class together.

Resident Amanda Miller, whose husband, Kyle, is also a first-year resident, tells Pike that during her obstetrics block she handled more than 50 deliveries, many of them C-sections -and more than enough to satisfy a training requirement - in just a single year. Pike's glad to hear it, as OB is sure to be a part of the small-town Kansas practice he envisions.

The Salina dinner, he says afterward, is everything he could have hoped for. "I had exposure to as many residents as possible. They really enjoyed hanging out and spending time together. They are a small group but have a lot of autonomy."