Just as I was wrapping up my day in the lab a few weeks ago, a vision of untold beauty greeted me in my inbox. 

My first interview of this cycle (from a top 25 school no less)! It seemed my luck was improving.  I scheduled the interview and waited impatiently for the day to come.

The day before the interview I drove from Athens to Birmingham. Despite almost falling asleep on the road, thinking my car was about to lose a wheel (nothing was wrong with the Prius, it was the poor quality of a certain stretch of I-20), and having my credit card rejected at a gas station, the trip wasn’t too bad.  I checked into my hotel to find that I had a gigantic room. It was really two rooms: a lounge area with a bar, a desk, a couch and a big screen TV, and a bedroom with 2 queen size beds. (Do I need two queen sized beds, you ask? Absolutely not, but it’s what they gave me, and it was awesome.)

After getting a meal at an Indian restaurant by the UAB hospital, I holed up in my palatial room to go over my applications and look at some questions previously asked at UAB interviews (Thanks studentdoctor.net!).  It was a night full of coffee, college basketball, and nerves. For those of you who don’t know, I can be a bit of a worrier, so my nerves weren’t helped by the fact that it took me until 9 o’clock to realize that I was in a different time zone (awesome in that I gained an hour, but very worrisome as I wondered what other obvious piece of information I could have missed). Eventually I made it to bed, imagining everything that could go wrong the next day.