Today is the day the new interns* start. 

July 1st is kind of a mashup of “back to school” with starting a new job, moving into a new house  — joining a new family. 

Residency will do that to you: it gives you a new family. The people you train with become your brothers-and-sisters-in-arms.  You share a foxhole of learning-on-the-fly, making calculated attacks on patients’ problems and the differential diagnoses they generate while at the same time dodging incoming paperwork, erupting crises, and emotional sinkholes.  

Interns are adopted into an extended family of physicians that has been growing and expanding for decades. On July 1st, you are the cherished younger siblings taking steps on your own with your older brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, parents and grandparents cheering you on.  (The medical students are the foster children each specialty gets to welcome and nurture as our own for shorter periods.). There will be personality conflicts, and sometimes even fights and injuries, but there will always be the bonds — and the memories. 

We all remember beginning our internships with trepidation and excitement.  Introducing ourselves as “doctor” and hearing the strangeness of it.  Learning to speak with authority, and to listen with compassion  — although we often doubted we deserved to.  Learning to ask for help, but rejoicing as we realized we did indeed have knowledge, skill, and endurance.  These are things we keep doing, even decades later, because “the art is long” and medicine, like life, is something to practice, to learn from, and to share. 

Welcome to the family, interns. And — thanks for the memories, fellow former interns.

(* and fellows!)