An engineer in Brooklyn and a med student in San Francisco

Twenty-six, originally from Toronto. Backend engineer at a fintech. Three roommates in Bushwick, kind, none of them really friends.

She has not been home for longer than five days since she moved down three years ago. Her mother sends her dried apricots in the mail.

Twenty-seven, last year of med school, just back from a long stretch of residency interviews. Her boyfriend of three years broke up with her last Saturday because she had told him she was ranking Denver and Aurora at the top of her list. He had thought it was going to be Boston.

She had thought it was going to be Boston too, until last fall when she went to Colorado for an interview and saw the mountains.

The engineer assumed she would be in tech. The med student laughed and said, it happens every time. They talked about hiking and Toronto and the cucumber salad the engineer's mother makes, and the absurdity of an algorithm running someone's life for a few months.

The engineer said she did not know how to bring up that her roommate's boyfriend had basically moved in. The med student said she did not know if she would match in Colorado at all. They both said sometimes the wait is the worst part.

The engineer told her: the worst case is you take a job somewhere else and move to Colorado later. People do that all the time.