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.

Dinner the night before tends to ease a candidate into a residency visit. Things speed up, though, on interview day, with office sit-downs, on-the-go questions, and tours of clinics, ERs, operating rooms, patient floors, and cafeterias.

In Salina, that involves bouncing between hospital and clinic, with resident Alisa Schmidt and Caren Bachman, coordinator of the Smoky Hill Family Medicine Residency Program, running the shuttles for Jonathan Pike, a KU School of Medicine-Wichita fourth-year.

"Did he talk your ear off?" Schmidt asks, after program director Dr. Robert Freelove's interview runs long. "Yes, but I talked his ear off, too," Pike says.

Later, after the daily lunch teaching session - vaginitis is the day's topic - Schmidt and fellow resident Kysha Nichols-Totten sit down with Pike. The interview is wide-ranging, with Nichols-Totten at one point sharing that "you can wear scrubs every single day, except when in clinic." Pike asks the residents how the program could improve, and receives candid answers.

Interview day in Kansas City starts with a presentation from Dr. Wendy Biggs, director of the residency program. Then Pike and the other candidates work from office to office for consecutive 25-minute interviews with Biggs and three others. Next, it's tour time, allowing Pike to "see parts of the hospital that I wasn't ever exposed to." Along the way, Dr. Patricia Fitzgibbons, a clinical assistant professor, advises: "Ask the residents about the program. They know. We like to think we do, but we don't."

Pike leaves Kansas City feeling good about the interview, just as he will after Smoky Hill two weeks later. But with interviews still to come in Greeley, Colorado, at three Texas programs and at Via Christi in Wichita, he knows a load of information must still be gathered and weighed.

"I picked each one for a reason, and each one deserves to be judged on its own merits and not with any preconceived idea," Pike says.

By mid-January, interview season is over, and both candidates and programs start making their choices. Pike submits his rankings before the Feb. 25 deadline, and then, like thousands of other students, he waits to find out where he'll live the next few years of his life.

"Whether that ends up being the place I ranked as No. 1 or somewhere further down the list, these programs all train great doctors. I'll end up where I'm supposed to end up. I'll learn what I am supposed to learn."