#MedCanes Chronicles: Merging Two Medical Careers into One Life
“#MedCanes Chronicles” offers first-person perspectives into the lives of medical students on their journey to becoming health care leaders. The series delves into the personal narratives of these aspiring doctors and scientists, shedding light on their struggles, triumphs and the resilience that propels them forward.
Harsh Moolani, M.D. Class of 2025
I stood there, envelope in one hand and FaceTime in the other. I slowly handed the phone to my dad and started to open the envelope. NYU Neurology. Sheer joy emerged. It was short-lived. I turned to my fiancée, Anupama Balasubramanian, on FaceTime and asked, “Where?”
Through the phone I heard her voice, despite a faulty connection: “Cor..llll… orn.ell…Cornell.”
I hugged my mom. We both started to squeeze tighter and tighter until we both broke out into tears. Not tears of sadness, but of overwhelming relief. After years of long distance between Miami and Burlington, Vermont, seeing each other just four or five times a year, my fiancée and I would finally be together in the same city.
But the path to this moment truly tested us.
Matching Med School Couples
The couples match process isn’t just a test of your medical knowledge or interview skills. It’s a test of your relationship. It forces you to quantify feelings, to rank dreams, to negotiate futures. How do you decide between your partner’s happiness and your own? Between a program that could launch your career and one that keeps you both under the same roof?
Friends and family outside medicine would ask, “So, after all of that work, you don’t get to pick where you go?” They couldn’t grasp the complexity. Even within medicine, the couples match remains a mystery. You don’t rank programs individually. You rank combinations. Up to 300 of them. Each combination is a potential future, a potential compromise.
I remember sitting across from my fiancée, who is attending medical school at Robert Larner, M.D. College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, staring at our spreadsheets — her with her programs, me with mine. The silence between us was heavy with unspoken fears. What if I push for my dream program and she ends up miserable? What if we prioritize being together and both end up in programs we resent? The statistics haunted us. With an estimated .04% chance of both getting our top choices, every decision felt like gambling with our futures.
“It’s a personal decision,” our mentors would say. But that’s exactly what made it so hard. Every choice felt deeply personal. By advocating for my preferences, I felt like I was taking something away from her future. The weight of these decisions turned our normally logical, data-driven minds into emotional wrecks.
Trust in Numbers
We hit our breaking point one month before the rank list deadline. Another late night, another circular conversation. Then her father, ever the pragmatist, asked a simple question. “Isn’t there a way you could make this more quantitative?”
That question changed everything. Until that point, we were playing with our list of preferences. It was all words. But then, we started to extract some numbers from our lists.
We created a tier system instead of strict rankings, grouping programs by how we truly felt about them rather than forcing artificial distinctions between nearly identical options.
We mapped out distances, not just in miles but in life quality. Could we live together? Would we see each other weekly? Monthly? Would holidays involve multiple connecting flights?
Most importantly, we developed an algorithm that took these factors — program tiers, distances, priorities — and generated a score for each combination. Suddenly, our emotional debates had a neutral mediator. The algorithm didn’t care about my career or hers. It only cared about optimizing our combined happiness.
The first time we ran the numbers, we both stared at the screen in disbelief. Some combinations we’d been fighting over didn’t even make the top 20. Others we’d barely considered rose to the top. The algorithm wasn’t perfect, but it broke our standoff and gave us a common language. Finally, it wasn’t personal. It felt objective.
We refined it over weeks, adjusting weights, playing with variables. We created bookmarks of different scenarios. What if I don’t get my dream interview? What if she matches at her number one? We shared PDFs with mentors, getting outside perspectives on logic rather than emotions.
On Match Day, when I heard “Cornell” through that glitchy FaceTime call, it wasn’t just a program name. It was the culmination of a system we’d built together. A system born from our struggles and frustrations, from the unique pain points of trying to merge two careers into one life.
Free Tool for Matching Couples
We’ve since turned this system into a free tool for other couples navigating this maze. Not because we have all the answers, but because we know the questions that keep you up at night. We know what it’s like to love someone and your career with equal passion, to fear that choosing one means sacrificing the other.
Our tool won’t guarantee your dream match. The algorithm can’t account for the interview you knock out of the park or the program director who champions your application. But it can bring clarity to chaos. It can help you understand each other’s priorities when words alone fall short.
Years of long distance taught us persistence. The couples match taught us compromise. Building this tool taught us that, sometimes, the most personal decisions benefit from a little mathematical distance. Not to remove the heart from the equation, but to help the heart and mind work better together.
Now, as my fiancée and I prepare to start our residencies at Cornell and NYU, respectively, we hope our tool helps other couples find their own path through the statistical mirage of couples match.
Tags: #MedCanes Ambassadors, Department of Medical Education, MedCanes Chronicles, medical education