Seeing the future

WORCESTER The group of University of Massachusetts Medical School students who gathered late yesterday was as varied as the paths before them. The students will not graduate until June, but yesterday was Match Day, the day they learn where they will do their residency.

Students at medical schools across the country opened their envelopes at the same time. At UMass, the group of 116 students included a couple who will marry today, a veteran who plans to return to combat zones as a doctor and a man who left his home in Sudan at age 11 as one of the Lost Boys.

Timothy J. Menz, who is originally from Braintree, and Tania Visnaskas, originally from Chelmsford, are making a weekend of matches. The two met in fall 2007, their first year of medical school, became friends and dated.

He proposed on Valentines Day in 2011 and yesterday she jumped into his arms as they learned they were both bound for Brown University-affiliated hospitals, he to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence for pediatrics and she to Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket for family medicine.

Today, the couple will get married in Haverhill.

It was like two months after we started dating that I said I would marry him tomorrow, Ms. Visnaskas said. Tomorrow took about three years.

Theyre planning a New Hampshire getaway after the wedding, followed by a trip to Disneyworld in a couple of months, because we didnt think it was legal for a pediatrician not to have gone to Disney World, Mr. Menz joked.

Elsewhere in the crowded lobby yesterday, Micah B. Blais of Holden was celebrating his acceptance into a residency at Harvard University-affiliated hospitals to start his career in orthopedic surgery. Mr. Blais, 32, studied information systems while at West Point, but after two tours of duty with the Army in Iraq, which he concluded as a captain, he decided to pursue medicine.

While deployed, he saw the relationship the doctors were able to maintain with the soldiers and the Iraqi civilians, he said. In between the tours he started in 2004 and 2007, he took a couple of night courses to qualify for medical school. The military is paying for his medical training, and he plans to work in combat zones.

In the meantime, however, he and his wife, Kim Anderson, are looking forward to the birth of their first child and will move closer to Boston.

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Seeing the future

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