CV Guide

Ben Bryner -- If I may pick up where Thomas left off in this post about personal statements, another one of the important elements of an application to med school (or residency) is getting your CV or resume together. (Review a discussion of CVs vs. resumes from the good people of the NIH here.) You don't technically need a formal CV to apply via AMCAS, the med school application service, or for ERAS, the US residency application service, since you upload descriptions of all your activities and experience to their websites and the program compiles a "CV" for you. But it's easy to adapt a CV to this purpose. And you do need a CV to give to people who are going to write your letters of recommendation. Plus, they're good things to have at your actual interview if necessary (to hand to the interviewer or to go over beforehand to make sure you bring up all the activities you want to remember).

There's not much to it besides gathering together the important stuff you've done, organizing it into meaningful categories, ordering it in reverse chronological order, trimming the explanations down to make it fit in your target zone, and then slapping your name and contact info on the top. Of course it’s time-consuming, and updating it is one of those not-fun activities I tend to procrastinate on. It plays kind of the same role that cleaning my room did was when I was a kid.

Anyway, you can find some good examples online, as well as some good tips. My advice, which you'll certainly hear elsewhere too: Pick a good font. It should be very readable, but getting away from Arial and Times New Roman is nice. Just don't use something like Comic Sans. (While it's hard to specify the very best font for a given situation, it's often easy to pick the worst for that situation: Comic Sans).

The other thing that lots of people will tell you to do is use "active" words in your CV. These words, like "spearheaded," "quantified," and "reorganized" make you seem more action-driven and emphasize all the things you can do. Our med school counselor sent around a list of these "action words," and you can find an alphabetized list here. Note though, that you should only use words that truly fit the action you're trying to describe. Have someone else read it if you're not sure how much sense it makes.

None of this is really anything new. So I'm going to do something different: I thought of a list of words not to use. Like the lists of "power words," this list isn't meant to be comprehensive, but rather to give you a sense of what words are good and what ones aren't.

Here are just a few words to avoid:

humiliated

crumbled

capitulated

absconded

indicted

fumbled

twiddled

undermined

swabbed (especially in the phrase "swabbed the deck;" this is an unimpressive entry-level task for pirates, and should never be used in a CV that will end up in the hands of a residency director, or in the hooks of a pirate captain)

hogtied

guesstimated

Bonus: Poor Adjectives for your CV

dainty

malodorous

perky

catastrophic

bitter

fancy

unexciting

apocalyptic

If several of these words were in your CV, then better to catch them now rather than later. If none of them were in your CV, then I'm sorry to have wasted your time, but I hope you can see the larger point. Your CV is a great opportunity to let your accomplishments shine, to prove to the world that you can do all the things you claimed in your over-the-top personal statement. Put in the time to create a solid CV so that all the work you put into your activities comes across, duly impressing the people determining your fate.