On an outing with other first-year medical students to Bell’s Eccentric Cafe to get to know other students, Elyssa Wiegand and David Wallington met.
The pair became friends and had several mutual friends, often finding themselves spending time together. They both joined the same soccer team and would get drinks with the whole team after games. They both had jobs in their hometowns in the Ann Arbor area and would carpool there, getting to know each other on the long drives.
But it was a minor encounter in Kalamazoo that Wiegand said made her realize she wanted to be more than friends. Wiegand and Wallington walked from the medical school’s downtown campus to a sub shop for lunch. Wallington got two sandwiches, and then handed one of them to a homeless man they passed on their way back to the school.
“Before that I knew him through studying a lot at that point, so I knew the smart, quick-witted part of him,” Wiegand said. “That day I saw a kindness in him that I didn’t see in him before.”
Since then, the couple says, their relationship has continued to evolve naturally and easily. As Match Day and graduation approached, it was understood that they would take part in the Couples Match without them having much discussion about it. Wiegand said she hopes to match in pediatrics while Wallington is eyeing radiation/oncology.
“Our relationship has been pretty much entirely drama free, stress free,” Wallington said. “The decision to couples match, it was like yeah, there’s no reason not to.”
Wiegand and Wallington are among 12 students in the MD Class of 2020 who will take part in the Couples Match and seek to complete their residency training at the same institution or in the same city. Other couples participating in the match include Arushi Tripathy and Vishal Somney and Lydia Hillier and Steve Peltier.
Match Day for the Class of 2020 will be held on Friday, March 20, 2020, at the Air Zoo in Portage. On Saturday, May 16, 2020, the students will graduate from WMed during a ceremony at the Kalamazoo State Theatre.
After Match Day and graduation, on July 1, 2020, the students will begin practicing medicine in the specialty of their choice as residents in a clinical setting under the supervision of fully licensed physicians.
The Main Residency Match is an annual process that begins in the fall for applicants, usually in the final year of medical school, when they apply to residency programs at which they would like to train. Program directors review applications and conduct candidate interviews in the fall and early winter. From mid-January to late February, applicants submit to the National Residency Match Program (NRMP) their rank order lists of preferred programs, and program directors rank applicants in order of preference for training. The NRMP uses a computerized mathematical algorithm to match applicants with programs using the preferences expressed on their ranked lists.
According to the NRMP, participating in the Match as a couple allows two applicants to link their rank order lists. Those lists are then used to form pairs of program choices that are considered by the algorithm and couples will match to the most preferred pair of programs on their rank order lists where each applicant is offered a position.
Gigi Newberry and Jon Ericson met on the same Bell’s trip and officially became a couple in October that year after Newberry said she finagled an invite to a camping trip with Ericson and his roommates, and Ericson caught on that she liked him.
“I actually finagled the invite onto the camping trip because I had been interested in Jon pretty much since I first met him,” Newberry said. I practically invited myself -- before dating Jon I was not one who camped -- so that I could spend more time with him.”
Now, four years later, Newberry hopes to match into obstetrics and gynecology and Ericson hopes to match into family medicine. They both want to stay in the Midwest.
Both couples said having someone to lean on through medical school who was going through the same stress at the same time helped.
“Our relationship made med school easier for us by having someone to support us that knew exactly what we were going through,” Newberry said. “While it wasn’t always as easy to spend time together having fun when studying took priority, it was wonderful to have a person to go through it all with.”