The one question that can make or break a resident's chance at matching here.

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It’s Match Week! The week when medical students find out where they’re headed for residency.

Here’s how it works. Every year, my residency program makes a rank list of applicants for the summer’s incoming class of interns. Hundreds of medical students submit applications. A subset are invited for interviews via Zoom. We then rank the candidates. The applicants also rank the programs where they have interviewed. Once all the lists have been submitted to a central computer, an algorithm determines everyone’s fate. Craziness. However, the system favors the students and, overall, is actually quite brilliant. In fact, its developers were awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Economics because it elegantly solved a longstanding and complex problem.

Every fall and winter, we have interviews days. At the end of each day, the faculty meets to discuss the applicants. This helps our program director determine our final list.

In my years of doing this, I’ve come to realize that there are many features that can help a candidate rank high on our list, from academic credentials to evidence of having overcome adversity and beating the odds to reach such a competitive stage. We’ve also done work internally to make sure we are aware of our own biases in this process.

I’ve also come to realize that there is one make-or-break question that we ask (either explicitly or implicitly) during our post-interview debriefing sessions, and it’s not the one I would have expected when I started as faculty in the Harvard-Associated Emergency Medicine Residency Program.