Seven years beside medical training.
I met Krishna near the end of her undergraduate years. Since then, we have moved through the long arc of medical training together, one transition at a time.
From Hopkins to Penn State to Penn, each step has made the hidden work of medicine more visible: the research, the interviews, the tradeoffs and the waiting.
Tejas ShahFounder, Carlo Med
Undergraduate
Johns Hopkins
Krishna was at Johns Hopkins for undergrad and graduated early. We met in 2019, near the end of that chapter, and the next step became something we talked through together.
When COVID changed daily life, the distance between our separate plans collapsed into a shared one.
Medical school
Penn State
Krishna went to Penn State for medical school. I was learning to build and ship products while she was learning the practice of medicine.
We kept running into the same question from different directions: how do you make a consequential path easier to see?
What makes this stage hard
- One binding result
- Residency placement comes through the Match. Applicants rank programs, programs rank applicants, and an algorithm assigns one result that both sides have agreed to accept.
- A Friday in March decides the move
- Results arrive on Match Day, the third Friday of March, and residency starts around July 1. That leaves about three months to set up a life in a city you may not have chosen.
- The information is scattered
- What a program is like lives on department pages, rosters and word of mouth. No single place holds it.
Residency
Internal medicine at Penn
Krishna is now in internal medicine residency at the University of Pennsylvania. The work became more immediate and the decisions more specific.
I was beside her, trying to understand the people, programs and tradeoffs behind the official process while continuing my own path through engineering, product and startups.
What makes this stage hard
- The next application starts early
- Internal medicine residency is three years. Cardiology applications go in at the start of the third, so the record that counts is built in the first two.
- Preparation competes with the job
- Residents can work up to 80 hours a week, averaged over a month. Interview research happens in whatever time is left.
- Every stage can mean a new city
- Medical school, residency and fellowship are separate applications to separate institutions. Each one can move a household.
Fellowship
Cardiology, now
Cardiology is the chapter Krishna is interviewing for now. It is also where the need behind Carlo became clearest: applicants need more than a ranking, and the people beside them need a way to stay oriented through the work.
So I built her the first interview kit: every interviewer researched, the program read from its sources, and questions drawn from her own record. She has taken it into her own interview days.
What makes this stage hard
- More applicants than positions
- Cardiology is one of the most competitive internal medicine subspecialties. Each year more people apply than there are positions.
- Each day is several conversations
- An interview day can hold program talks, several one-to-one faculty interviews and time with the current fellows. Every one of those people has a career worth reading before you meet them.
- One season, one answer
- Interviews run through the fall, rank lists follow, and a single binding match result closes the season.
Why Carlo exists.
Carlo is our attempt to make the path more legible: to put the evidence, the people and the decisions in one place, without pretending that a person’s future can be reduced to a score.
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