Looking for advice - career transition

Little bit of back story - my finance is a med student and we’ve made the decision for her to apply to residencies all across the country. The city we live in now is good, but not great for us. Ultimately, we just don’t really feel ready to settle down yet and are excited to have a chance to venture to a new place.
 I have no qualms at all about this decision, but am having a hard time navigating the timing of finding a new job in whatever city we land in, mostly because we don’t know where she’ll be accepted. For anyone unfamiliar, the match process that med students go through isn’t like the job interview process. You get a single option for where you do residency (if you’re lucky enough to get one at all), and you either take it, or defer to apply again a year later. We expect her to match, and think there’s a good chance she lands somewhere other than the city that we live in, but won’t find out where until late March, and ideally I’d like to start a new gig sometime in either June or July.  Little bit about my professional background: I currently work as an associate at a LMM boutique IB focused on M&A advisory . The job is great - interesting work, great coworkers, competitive pay (in good markets/good years). Have genuinely enjoyed my time at the firm, but don’t want to make decisions about where we live based strictly on my employment. 
 Before this firm, I worked in consulting, and developed a solid skill set but didn’t find it as meaningful or interesting as the M&A work we do at the bank. With that said, I’d really like my next gig to be in finance rather than consulting. I’m exploring buy side options, but am not necessarily holding my breath given the competitive nature of those roles, the structured recruiting, and my untraditional background (not BB, finance major from target school, etc.). I think I could be competitive for some kind of buy side role given my experience (niche industry, others have exited well, etc.) but don’t know a ton about the crazy recruiting process that you hear so much about. 
 The way I see it, I have a few options: - Start contacting firms (buy side or sellside) now, to try to get in their associate interview process, even though I have no idea where I’ll be moving. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is a good idea given the uncertainty. I’m sure anyone would have a hard time finding my interest compelling if I told them it was predicated on my fiance matching to a program in the city. With that said, I keep wondering if I need to start the process now to have any chance.  - Wait until we know where we’re going to start reaching out to firms. Would obviously be more targeted, probably more appropriate, and could possibly even leverage some contacts at the firm that I work with now. I expect the transition to be fully supported by the team I work with - it’s something I’ve been transparent about from the beginning of my employment and has been discussed freely. My concern here is that I might be late to the party for buy side, and therefore be relegated to either a sell side (if I’m lucky) or back to consulting, which I’d prefer to avoid. 
 Anyone been through a similar transition and have any lessons they’ve learned? Any thoughts? Also, first post, so don’t hesitate to lmk if I’ve somehow broken the code of law here.