CHICAGO – Determining the Rank List is one of the most daunting tasks of medical school. It’s a time when each medical student in the country must take into consideration a plethora of information to decide where they’d like to attend residency. For the FSM class of 2016, the entire class was not certified until the morning of the last possible day, thanks in part to one M4 student with severe OCD.

“I wish I could say this with hyperbole, but I stared at my Rank List non-stop for over a month,” Ben Dawson revealed to The Flipside in an exclusive interview. “The anxiety, the sleep loss, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to the point that it felt ‘just right.’ And by that, I mean I felt like Goldilocks trying out different porridges, but never finding the right temperature.”

With pressure from AWOME, Dawson was forced to make up his mind.

“When I put it in alphabetical order, things just made sense. The anxiety was gone. It looked and felt great!”

Dawson was happy to share that he matched in Anesthesiology to a program in Abbeville, Louisiana.