By Dr. Walaa Hasan
There are certain emails you never forget opening:
“Congratulations! You have matched.”
I had read words like these back when I matched into Internal Medicine residency after years of examinations, applications, uncertainty, and sacrifice. This time, the words carried a different meaning: I had matched into a Hematology and Oncology fellowship, the specialty that had been at the heart of my career long before I came to the United States to train.
For a few moments, I simply stared at the screen.
What Residency Gave Me
I began Internal Medicine residency in 2023, six weeks after giving birth to my daughter. I knew what the next three years were supposed to give me: knowledge, clinical experience, and the training I needed to pursue fellowship. What I did not anticipate was how much residency would change the way I saw myself as a physician. In the beginning, much of my energy was focused inward. Am I doing enough? Do I know enough? Am I progressing at the right pace? Over time, instead of asking only, “How am I doing?” I found myself asking, “How can I help?”
I became an Associate Chief Resident, mentored junior residents, and founded our Resident Research Committee after recognizing how many residents had good ideas but needed guidance and opportunities to pursue them. Some of my proudest moments came not from my own accomplishments, but from watching others grow, present their work, and discover what they were capable of.
By the end of residency, I had gone from searching for opportunities to being able to create them for others. I began with a focus on proving that I could succeed. I left understanding that perhaps the greater purpose was to grow enough to help someone else succeed, too.
Residency also changed my relationship with uncertainty. I learned that confidence does not mean having every answer. It means knowing how to approach what you do not know, when to ask for help, and being willing to keep learning.
Applying for Fellowship as an IMG
Before moving to the United States, I had trained in Clinical Oncology and Nuclear Medicine in Egypt, completed a master’s degree in the same discipline, and worked as both a physician and an educator. Oncology was not a specialty I discovered during residency; it was a field I had chosen years earlier and one I had intentionally worked toward returning to. But knowing what I wanted did not make the application process less intimidating.
As an IMG, it is difficult not to become preoccupied with numbers. How many programs should I apply to? Are my scores competitive enough? Does my previous experience matter? Will programs understand my path? It is remarkably easy for years of growth to become reduced, in your own mind, to a collection of numbers and checkboxes. My fellowship application forced me to look at my career differently.
I could not change every score or every decision I had made years earlier. What I could present was the physician I had become: an oncologist who had been willing to train again in a new healthcare system; a resident who loved teaching and mentorship; a researcher who wanted to create opportunities for others; a mother who had learned that determination and exhaustion can coexist; and, above all, a physician who still loved oncology after everything it had taken to return to it.
During my oncology rotations and fellowship interviews, something shifted. I stopped thinking only about whether a program would choose me and started asking whether I could imagine becoming the doctor I wanted to be there. The application process became less about proving that I deserved a place and more about finding the place where I could continue growing.
Match Day, Again
Anyone who has gone through the Match knows the peculiar experience of allowing an algorithm to reveal the next several years of your life in a single moment. When I opened the result that I had matched into my first-choice program, there was joy, of course. There was relief. But there was something else that was harder to name.
Years earlier, I had left an established medical career in Egypt knowing that coming to the United States would require me to take a longer route toward the career I envisioned.
Matching again made me understand the difficulties I’d navigated thus far differently. The path I’d taken had not been a detour from my career after all. All along, I had still been on the road to the physician I was becoming.
Becoming a Beginner Again
This past July, I walked into the hospital as a Hematology and Oncology fellow for the first time. It was both familiar and completely new. After becoming a senior resident and Associate Chief Resident, the person who was supposed to know what to do, I was a first-year fellow asking questions again. There were new diseases to master, treatments to understand, clinical decisions with enormous consequences, and an extraordinary amount to learn. Some days I left the hospital energized by how much I had learned. Other days I left thinking about how much I still did not know. But this time, being a beginner felt different.
Residency had taught me that uncertainty is not evidence that you do not belong; it is often evidence that you are growing. I no longer expect myself to arrive at every new stage already knowing how to succeed in it—I expect myself to learn.
The Meaning of Moving Forward
When I wrote my first Journeys in Medicine entry, “Redefining the Path Forward,” I was still trying to understand what moving forward meant. At different points in my life, I thought it meant reaching the next milestone: passing an examination, matching into residency, becoming a senior resident, matching into fellowship. I understand it differently now.
A career in medicine is full of destinations that quickly become beginnings. One day, I will finish fellowship and become an attending. I suspect I will once again discover an entirely new set of things I do not know.
There will always be another milestone. What remains between those milestones is who we become while pursuing them. Residency gave me far more than a clinical foundation to become a hematologist-oncologist. My years in training taught me that leadership can begin with noticing something that needs to change, that mentorship can alter the trajectory of another person’s career, and that asking for help and offering it are equally important. I also learned that success feels different when we stop measuring it only by what we achieve for ourselves. And I learned that being an IMG is not simply a challenge to overcome. The experiences we carry across countries, institutions, and healthcare systems can become part of what we contribute.
At the time I’m writing this returning entry, I am a first-year Hematology and Oncology fellow. I am still learning. I still have moments of uncertainty. I still have days when balancing medicine, research, family, and everything else feels nearly impossible. But I am also exactly where I once hoped I would be.
To the IMG studying for another examination, waiting for another interview invitation, opening another rejection, or wondering whether the years of effort will eventually lead somewhere: I cannot tell you what your path will look like, but I can tell you that it does not have to look like anyone else’s. There may be chapters when progress is obvious and others when it feels invisible. There may be moments when you are so focused on moving forward you do not realize how far you have already traveled.
Keep learning. Seek mentors. Build community. Create opportunities when you cannot find them. And when you finally reach one of the destinations you worked so hard for, allow yourself to celebrate—then be ready to become a beginner again. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about a journey in medicine is that there is always more road ahead.
Dr. Walaa Hasan is a returning author to Journeys in Medicine. Read her entry from 2025 here: “Redefining the Path Forward.”