Match Season: Leaning Into Uncertainty
Emily Cortez Chong
— MEDICAL SCHOOL —
College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific
— GRADUATING CLASS —
2026
At 11:59 p.m. on New Year's Eve, I found myself crouched under the dining room table with my sisters. Each of us held 12 grapes, carefully selected and removed from their stalk, ready to be eaten. Las doce uvas de la suerte, or “The Twelve Grapes of Luck,” is a Spanish tradition that gained recent virality on social media. According to the tradition, eating one grape under a table with each chime of the clock at midnight sets your intention for each of the 12 months and promises to bring a year of prosperity, growth, and, of course, luck. As I closed my eyes and ate the third grape—the one for March—my mind was flooded with thoughts that drifted to Match Day.
Thus far, my medical training has been defined by highly structured checkpoints: passing board exams, submitting ERAS applications, and soon, matching to a residency in March to begin in July. Match Day is often an emotional one, a culmination of years spent shaping yourself into the physician you hope to become. Yet as I reflect on my time in medical school, I am most struck not by these milestones but by the quiet work between them: rehearsing for OSCEs, puzzling over a vaguely familiar Anki card, and nervously presenting to an attending for the first time. In this final stretch before interviews conclude, I have gained an appreciation for these in-between moments.
Unlike Match Day, the waiting period that precedes it exists quietly in the background, during hospital rounds and family gatherings and even while refreshing an e-mail inbox that you know won't change today. It is a period that is defined by uncertainty that can't resolve with effort alone. But sitting with uncertainty is not new to medicine—patients rarely arrive with clean timelines or clear diagnoses. They improve, plateau, worsen, then surprise you. We wait for cultures to grow, for medications to work, for clarity that may or may not come. Match season feels destabilizing because it forces us to confront the illusion that uncertainty is something we can always resolve quickly. It reminds us that sometimes the only option is to remain present without answers.
Waiting, it turns out, is a skill that I am still cultivating. It is learning not to catastrophize every possible outcome, not to anchor your self-worth to a future you cannot yet see. It is holding multiple versions of your life at once and resisting the urge to prematurely grieve or celebrate any of them. In medicine, we do this all the time. We diligently formulate our plans and then wait on the patients' response to treatment, knowing that time and patience are needed before changing our course of action. In the meantime, what we can control is how we show up and care for others and how firmly we remain grounded in what brought us to this profession.
Uncertainty also has a way of revealing values. Sitting with uncertainty can make priorities more evident. Rank lists become less about prestige or geography and more about questions that are harder to quantify: Where will I be supported? How will I build community? Who will teach me how to think, not just what to do? What kind of physician do I want to become when no one is watching? Match season forces us to confront what we value when there are no guarantees, and that exercise may be more formative than the outcome itself.
In that sense, Match season quietly prepares us for residency. Training does not suddenly become straightforward once you match. If anything, responsibility increases while ambiguity remains. Physicians learn to make decisions with incomplete information, to revisit plans as new data emerge, and to tolerate discomfort without disengaging. Match season is an early rehearsal for that reality: a reminder that uncertainty does not mean failure, and waiting does not mean inaction.
It is tempting to view Match as a verdict on effort, worth, or potential. But it is more accurate to see it as a transition. Wherever we land, uncertainty will follow us into residency, into patient care, and into the lifelong practice of medicine. The skill is not avoiding it but learning how to remain steady within it.
If Match season has taught me anything, it is that uncertainty is not an obstacle to becoming a good physician—it is part of the job. And learning to show up anyway, without answers, may be one of the most important lessons I carry forward.
Are you a third-year medical student looking ahead to the Match process next year? Prepare with ACP Match resources on the I.M. Residency Application Hub.