The Sunday before every rotation starts, it’s well advised to do a “dry run”. You go to the site the day before to recon the parking situation, learn the best route, be familiar with the highway exits if necessary, etc.
I didn’t do this before the Dupont rotation in March. Primarily because I was dead tired from driving all the way to Fort Wayne. I’d been in Fort Wayne before, just not in this region. IPFW, where I was staying in student housing, is located right near the center of the metropolitan area, a couple miles northwest of the CBD. The hospital was all the way up near the north edge of town. How hard could it be? I’ll just take the main arterial roads, Clinton and Auburn.
So I’m putzing along Clinton for about for twenty minutes wondering why I’m surrounded by cornfields when I pull over to check a map and realize I missed the turn off onto Auburn. Because the sign at the intersection doesn’t call it Auburn Rd; it calls the cross-street “Garden Park Dr”.
Perfect.
Alright then, whatever. So I turn onto “Auburn Rd” all the while musing to myself that this is dumb, I realize all too late that the inner lane turns into a left turn lane at the next intersection. So I am forced to turn onto Cook Rd which takes me perpendicular to the way I wanted to go. I have to wing it down Coldwater until I got to Dupont Rd. And as it happens, that particular intersection has a Kroger at it which I swung by later that week.
That Kroger was one of those “Super-Krogers” with, like furniture sections, and greeters and everything. And they got some damned decent sushi. Which really hit the spot at the end of the week. And to think I never would have known about this if I hadn’t taken the wrong turn. I would have been stuck with that Target grocery two miles away from IPFW in the opposite direction. (Damn sprawl.)
So how do you avoid being in the wrong lane? Well, it would have been nice if someone could have warned me ahead of time. And it would have been wise to do that dry run. But sometimes these things catch you by surprise. And you just have to learn to roll with it. You may not make it to where you want in the time you thought you would. You may get detoured and turned around and have to stop and reevaluate things. Maybe you’ll find something you would have missed. But, hey, at least you’ll learn the streets a little better.
I didn’t get that residency I wanted. Any of them. And I scrambled after Match Day. And didn’t get any of those. Looking back, I have some good ideas about where I went wrong. I didn’t present myself how I should’ve, I didn’t emphasize my strengths, I didn’t showcase my passions.
And my interests changed during the rotation year. I realized that pharmacists aren’t the most techsavvy bunch. My IT knowledge, I really took for granted. (Hanging out with engineers led me to think I wasn’t anything special.) But with my tech skills made obvious and the newfound fact that my CompTIA A+ certification from 2007 doesn’t expire, I’d say pursuing a health care informatics specialty is my next logical move. First I have to get employed to start acquiring some of that “1-2 years of experience” that employers seem to require for applicants. Then I’ll get cracking on a new A+ certification (since restructured).
So this is the detour. This is the universe where I didn’t get a residency and started chasing a different rabbit. But would I have known about this path if I were not turned off my intended route? Maybe this is the optimal timeline.
Better lose this facial hair then…
Sounds like an interesting and reasonable plan. Best of luck. Let me know if there’s something I can help with.
As someone who fancies himself as knowing a reasonable amount about computers, I feel confident saying you also know a reasonable amount about computers. Also, well done on the subtext animation