Tell a cohesive story on your physician residency application

Unlike numerical metrics, a medical student’s journey toward physician residency—their passions, aspirations and motivations—is unique to each applicant. Telling the story of where you have been and where you see yourself going can be central to landing the right residency position in the right specialty.

In a session at the AMA Distinguish Yourself Medical Student Summit in June, Jordan M. Warchol, MD, MPH, offered insight on how applicants can effectively tell their stories to residency programs.

The AMA helps medical students master the residency-application process so you can make the right decisions about your career, prepare for a knockout interview, explore residency opportunities—all so you can successfully match.

As applicants embark on the residency-selection process, no online resource contains as much information as FREIDA™, the AMA Residency and Fellowship Database^®, which includes more than 13,000 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited residency programs, and offers a streamlined user experience.

You cannot begin to tell your story if a residency program does not download your residency application. The best way to ensure your application does get seen is to excel academically.

“Nothing on your application matters—you could’ve written 17 research publications in JAMA—if your performance in the classroom is not good,” said Dr. Warchol, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “Residency programs are trying to train people to be physicians, not first authors in JAMA. … You have to make sure your performance in the classroom doesn’t suffer from trying to build up your CV.”

Dive deeper:

• The top questions to ask before you submit your residency application
• Applying for residency programs: Fourth-year med students' essential checklist

As much as applicants may be the narrators of their stories, they are not the only voices. Letters of recommendation and the Medical Student Performance Evaluation—the MSPE, formerly called the dean's letter—also offer heavy sway on how programs view a residency applicant.

To make sure those aspects of an application present you favorably, it is important to show your dedication to training every single day.

“If the narrative that comes through in your dean’s letter is that you are not a hardworking, generous, kind individual who wants to work and shows up ready to go—that’s a big red flag,” said Dr. Warchol, who currently serves as immediate past chair of the AMA Young Physicians Section.

Dive deeper:

• How to secure letters of recommendation that sparkle
• Meet Your Match: Getting standout letters of recommendation

It is important to gain experiences in the key fields on the MyERAS application—including leadership, community service and research. It’s also critical to apply to programs that are receptive to the story you are telling.

“My program recruits a lot of persons who want to go to rural areas to practice emergency medicine,” Dr. Warchol said. “If you don’t have anything on your application about why you’re picking our program that is known for training people who want to work in rural areas, we aren’t going to give you a second look.”

Your most valuable experiences are not necessarily gained in the clinic or the classroom. Make sure to highlight things that make you special.

One of Dr. Warchol’s friends—now a rural neurosurgeon—"put on his application that he grew up on a cattle farm, and that’s what he did every summer. He didn’t do a bunch of research or have a ton of publications, but his leadership was running his team on his cattle ranch every summer. He said that in every interview he went to, that’s all anybody wanted to talk about was him birthing cattle. That’s the story he told.”

Because the man was applying to neurosurgery, considered a rigorous specialty, Dr. Warchol said that the hard work required to work on a cattle farm made him stand out.

“Think about what you want to go into, think about what the essential characteristics to that specialty are, and be able to tell that story,” she said.

Dive deeper:

• Residency Match: 4 tips for writing a standout personal statement
• 6 keys to creating a medical student CV that sets you apart 

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The number of experiences one lists on a residency application are not going to be more important to program directors than the quality of those experiences. Or, as Dr. Warchol put it, “more doesn’t always mean more.”

“One of the things I heard a lot from program directors was they would rather see true dedication to one thing as opposed to 47 scattered things,” she said. “If you volunteered at the local homeless shelter every week, three hours a week, for your entire career, it may just be listed as one box [on your application], but that means a lot more to them than if you volunteered for an hour at the homeless shelter, an hour at the food bank, and you did an hour over here and there. Those concentrated experiences are much more meaningful to the story you are telling.”

Dive deeper:

• How medical student research can resonate with residency programs
• Meet your Match: Perfecting your application packet

Data from the Association of American Medical Colleges indicates that about three-quarters of medical students change their career preferences during medical school. This might mean that research and shadowing experiences from early in medical school don’t concern the specialty to which you end up applying. That’s OK, Dr. Warchol said.

“One of my good friends thought for all of med school that he wanted to be a radiologist,” she said. “He was gung-ho. And then at the end of his third year, on his surgery clerkship, he did an ophthalmology rotation and absolutely fell in love with it. He made the pivot and the story he told was exactly that: I thought I wanted to be a radiologist. I loved radiology and then I did [ophthalmology] and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do.”