Sometimes the fast lane hits a fork

Since I started medical school, I have always planned to take a year off to complete a masters in public health degree. Last fall I applied to four schools for this program - my home medical (OHSU), Harvard, Tulane, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). I was accepted in the early spring to OHSU and Tulane, and Harvard took the opportunity to reject me for no less than the second time in my short academic career (the fist time was as a med school applicant). LSHTM rejected me from half a dozen different tracks (several of which I had never applied to in the first place), so I chose Tulane, put a deposit down on campus housing, and planned to move to New Orleans in August.

But then in May, an email came from London granting me a place in the program for Control of Infectious Disease. I accepted, and after a lengthy battle with financial aid offices, the UK consulate, and my own school, I pulled out of Tulane and accepted at LSHTM. And so, to quote a song you've probably never heard, Sometimes the fast lane hits a fork. Sometimes you're going along at a steady clip, and then comes a quick veer, and suddenly you're somewhere very different, and sometimes that is a very good thing. The decision to go to London – where two of the bombs in that recent attack went off within blocks of the school - meant (to paraphrase my father) that I dodged a very large bullet, a category four bullet named Katrina. Classes were scheduled to start at Tulane the day the first hurricane roared into the city, and the website Tulane set up to keep students informed during the storm (http://tulane.edu/students.html) reads eerily like a reverse itinerary of disaster.

So, in deference to the unforeseen fact that I appear to prefer bombs to hurricanes, I am in London for the coming year!