We were looking a lot more at geography and things to do and what was around Fort Worth rather than looking specifically at the programs. My fiancee at the time, now my wife, we've been in Big 10 Country forever. So we decided to look abroad and go out of our Big 10 bubbles. We wanted to go on an adventure, something new. We knew that residency was kind of this awesome chunk of time to go somewhere else and explore and develop our own marriage and our family. We were looking as far west as Seattle, as far East as North Carolina. And then for some reason, Texas just sounded right to both of us. Really, the mainstay was just trying to do something new and Texas just kept calling our name. It was this gut feeling thing and we were amped and ready to go to Texas ever since we went down to Fort Worth. So it just seemed right. Looking back, I should have taken a little bit of a deeper dive into what the program had to offer and the specifics of what I could get out of the program rather than just geography.

Fort Worth is, specifically for a Midwesterner, a great large city. It has all the amenities of a big metropolis. You have a large airport, you have awesome food, you have great transportation. It is not like Dallas. Actually, they call it the “cow town.” So all of the Cowboys would live in Fort Worth. So it has a Midwest mentality where people are very friendly, very down to earth, a lot of ranchers live in Fort Worth. I consider it a Midwest-friendly, but a large city where you can gell all the stuff you need or you can head west and escape.

Texas is hot. In the summer when you're going to the hospital, it's like 95 degrees at six in the morning. I'll go to the hospital, and then the AC is turned down to like 60 degrees, so you're freezing in the hospital. I was always wearing a coat. After your shift, you come out and it is 110 degrees at night. So I felt like there was no reprieve from the warmth, but then the temperature is always flipped. Additionally, I mean the long hours, obviously, of residency are difficult and you're putting in work. You're working really hard. The learning curve is very steep.

I'll kind of break this into two parts. Research-wise, one of my interests was how safe is it for a woman to come back to elite sports after giving birth? And this question came about because my wife was pregnant with our son and she was an elite marathoner. And I was like, “How safe is it that she'd get back to running 60-plus miles a week?” It actually turned into a big research project with our sports medicine group. So that was kind of fun.  

The second thing I've been kind of curious about is in sports medicine if we learn a lot about exercise medicine and providing exercise as a prescription. I found myself thinking, “Do we actually practice what we preach?” You see patients come to the clinic, and we say, “You need to do your rehab exercises.” And I found myself being like, “Yea, I have knee pain all the time from running, but I never do my rehab, but I'm telling you to do your rehab.” So I was kind of curious if this is universal or if this was just something that I was doing.

So initially, when I thought about the answer to this, I was going to say, “Go with your gut.” And I think looking back on it, I definitely did go with my gut. I definitely don't have a tangible, “I went to this program because of this.” It was more of, it just felt right. 

I think I would have encouraged myself to be confident in my gut decision. Know that it's all going to work out no matter what that letter reads. There are great programs out there. There are a ton of opportunities available and all of the programs have something special to offer. And so rather than getting too down in the details, take a step back and think, “All right, my gut says, ‘We're going to go with JPS. That's number one, we're rolling with it. Let's go have some tacos and hang out.’”

Something really important. After every interview, I called my wife and I said all of my thoughts about the interview. And she actually took notes. She wrote down everything I said. At  the end of all of our interview season, she revisited her notes. And I said, “Okay, what do you think I should rank?” Because I didn't remember some of the things I said, she had paid attention to my tone. And she found that at the end of the season, I was always referring back to JPS. So that actually went into our rank list. 

And the other thing was, I said to her, “What do you want out of the next three years of your life? What are you looking for? Where do you want to live? Where do you not want to live? What's important to you?” Because at the end of the day, if she was coming with me, she had to be happy, too. Otherwise, it wasn't worth putting that on my rank list. So I actually framed a lot of my decision-making on whether or not our surroundings, geography, and opportunities would be able to fulfill her joy. And so it was a joint decision.