Every year, fourth-year medical students stress about the September 15th deadline to submit residency applications. If you found this post, you are likely in pre-panic or full-on panic mode right now. More than that, you are looking for final-hour residency application tips to put your mind at ease. The process of compiling recommendation letters, transcripts, a personal statement, a CV, and a list of professional and personal activities can be quite daunting. I surely spent my fair share of time stressing over varying parts of this process. However, I compiled this list of residency application tips that can help you to fine-tune your application in just a few days.
1. Ask yourself: "Does this application give an accurate portrayal of who I am?"
What are the traits that you hope to share with the program directors who read your application? Are you a leader? A visionary? An innovator? A caring person? A genius? An independent thinker? A team player? Whatever characteristics about yourself you deem to be most important, make sure they are obviously on display throughout your residency application.
I suggest taking a moment to write a list of 10 attributes about yourself that make you a great candidate for your chosen specialty. Then, ask yourself: "Does this application highlight the most important qualities about me as a future physician?" If you answered, "yes," congrats! You successfully formulated your application to attract the program directors looking for someone just like you. If you answered, "no," take some time to think about which experiences highlight the traits that you hope to emphasize. Next, edit your application to make sure that those attributes are included throughout the residency application.
2. Humblebrag about yourself as much as possible in the experiences section
The residency application is the time for you to SHOW OFF about all of the amazing things you've done in life. Do it humbly, but make sure you let the program directors know how much of a boss you are. The application is not the time to be coy. List every publication you've written. Describe the impact you've made as a student-leader. Talk about all the great non-medical work experience you have. Whatever your greatest accomplishments are, share them unabashedly.
As an example of an okay description of a leadership experience, you could write, "I served as the co-president of the [insert club name here] for one year." OR you could write a more colorful description: "As co-president of [insert club name here], I led a team of XX people to develop a new resource for .... which led to improvements of .... for XX students at my medical school."
In short, be sure to fully describe the extent of the impact you had in the various experiences that you write about in your residency application.
3. Print out your residency application for all final edits
As you get close to submitting your residency application, be sure to print out your application for the final revisions. This step might seem antiquated or like a waste of paper, but there's something about ink on paper that certainly helps me to see errors that I missed while editing on my laptop. Once you print out your application, reread every word out loud and edit the application until you're tired of reading about yourself. If you're not sick of rereading your application, you haven't edited it enough.
4. Have others proofread every part of the application
I'm sure you've read your application more times than you can count, but no one can catch a typo as well as someone with a fresh pair of eyes. Your brain fills in what you meant to write. A proofreader sees what you actually wrote. I can't tell you the number of times my sister or another one of my blog readers has shot me a message about a typo in my blog posts. We're not perfect, and getting a proofreader to give you feedback is essential. Make sure to pick someone (or multiple people) who will be critical about content, sentence structure, vocabulary, and grammar. It all matters. You want your residency application to be error-free.
If you truly can't find someone to proofread your application for you, consider online editing software like Grammarly, which can help you with simple edits (for free) or more complex edits (at a cost).
5. Don't stress too much if a letter writer seems like they won't make the submission deadline
Telling a medical student not to stress over the residency application process is like telling a dog not to bark. But yet, here I am, telling you not to stress. I can say this from experience. I spent a lot of wasted time stressing over trying to get my letter writer to submit my recommendation letter before the submission "deadline." I spent days and days with palpitations, nightmares, and headaches over the fact that it seemed like my letter writer would miss the deadline. After all, if my letter was late, I wouldn't get into residency, right?! WRONG! One of my letter writers submitted my letter late (granted only by a few hours), and guess what, no one ever mentioned it on the interview trail. What they did mention, however, was how wonderfully she wrote about me. So don't sweat the exact time that your letter writers submit the letter of recommendation. I've heard several friends tell me that their recommenders also submitted their letters up to a couple of weeks late, and guess what? We all matched! So as long as you chose the right person to write a strong letter on your behalf, have faith that what they write will matter more than when they submit!
Summary
I hope that you found these residency application tips useful! It's not a comprehensive list by any means, but I think that these few tips can help ensure that you submit an application that you're happy with!
Once you submit your residency application, be sure to check out some of my other posts for tips on navigating the residency interview trail. Whether you are interested in making the most out of each city you visit or you want to think about managing anxiety around Match Day, there's a post for you!
Good luck! You've got this!!
