We Killed a lot of Trees (not by choice)

As most of you know Tom is in his last year of residency.  As exciting as that sounds, its actually a bit scary because now the question is asked "What are you going to do next?"  And this time he actually gets to answer for himself.  So, when the question was asked of Tom, "what are you going to do next?", he said "a Sports Medicine Fellowship".  My jaw probably hit the floor.  I was thinking I would hear the word "JOB" come out of his mouth, but of course my lovely, wonderful, hardworking, always in the middle of a project, never sitting still husband wanted to further his education!  Really this shouldn't be a shock to me, but I was definitely ready to live out my Real Housewives of NYC life and be a stay at home...well...a stay at home mom to the dogs I guess :) (not that that would EVER happen!)
So, as any supportive wife would do, I got on the Sports Med bandwagon.  Tom met with his advisor multiple times going through each individual fellowship program one by one narrowing them all down to 24 choices (yes, I did say narrowing).

*Side note: Fellowships are very competitive.  There is only ONE in Minnesota and it only accepts THREE people a year!*

He then brought them all home for us to go over together.  They ranged from Maine down to North Carolina over to California and everything in between.  We talked about where we would like to live, and ultimately what kind of Sports Medicine did Tom want to practice?  Division 1, high-school, Professional, clinic, etc., etc.  I of course could have cared less what he said after I found out there was a chance at Iowa City.  I mean come on, is there really any place better?!?  GO HAWKS!  I really listened to all he had to say about each program and took in all the positives and negatives.  We then ranked places solely on where we might like to live.  The list looked something like this:

1.Iowa

2.Maine

3.California

4.Wisconsin

5.North Carolina

6.Minnesota

I was thinking, "great we've narrowed it down from 24 to 6!"  Oh man, was I seriously mistaken!  Let's just say we finally mailed the applications out yesterday and 23 amazing schools will get to carefully read glance through Tom's application.  Yup, you read that right.  We took one out.  ONE!  and the only reason we took it out was because we initially thought it was in Kansas City, but later found out it was in the middle of no where Kansas and Tom knew I wouldn't go for that!

Now, you may be thinking, what does all this have to do with killing a bunch of trees???  Well, if any of you have ever applied to any sort of higher education you know the amount of paper involved, but this by far exceeded any I've ever seen.  Probably because normal people only apply to 1 or 2 places but whatever.  Consider this:

9 page application

2 page CV (resume)

Transcript

Copies of publications

Personal Statement

3 Letters of Recommendation

Dean's Letter

Copy of Medical License

Copy of Board scores

and probably 10 other things I am forgetting

All of this to 23 different schools equals half of a National Forrest!  We literally went through 3 reams of paper in one night!

The silver lining in all of this is, we're done! off the hook for a little bit.  The next step will be interviews, ranking, and match day!  OH JOY!  Can you sense the excitement in the Mullin household???  YAY for furthering our education!

P.S. I meant to take a picture of all the paper, but got too excited when I saw the finish line and just sealed those envelopes SHUT!