Curriculum Vitae
Include only information about your academic background and professional, medically-related, experiences. Poor spelling, grammar, layout, and structure as well as a CV containing irrelevant information, may negatively impact your opportunity for a residency.
Creating your own personal CV is helpful to give faculty who are writing you letters of recommendation. You may also present your CV to individual faculty on the interview trail.
ERAS requires that you enter your CV directly into the ERAS application. The ERAS application includes most of the same information that would be included in a typical CV.
When considering information to include in the CV that you will use as a part of your residency application, ask yourself:
1) Does this help? Will this piece of information help someone select me for a residency interview?
2) If I were reading the CV for the first time, without knowledge of my qualifications as an applicant, would the information be useful?
The core content of your CV should include:
- Identification: At the top of the page place your name, current address, phone number, and email address. Do NOT include date of birth, social security number, marital status, etc. Consider using a bold font to highlight your name.
- Education: Name, location, degree and dates of attendance of all schools since high school. Include your most recent education at the top of the list.
- Honors (Awards and Scholarships): This section is self-descriptive. If the nature of the award is likely to be unfamiliar to the reader, include a very brief description (i.e. “Pasteur award” for highest cumulative performance in medical microbiology-MS 1). If you have held an elected position while an undergraduate, or more importantly while in medical school, include that information here.
- Research: Indicate the institution, department, principal investigator/supervisor, and brief title of the research project, your role, and dates of participation.
- Publications - Presentations: Include any published articles you've authored. If an article has been accepted for publication but not yet published, use the notation "in press" instead of the year of publication. If necessary, consult a medical librarian for correct bibliographic citation rules.
- Cite any presentations (oral or poster) you’ve made at student colloquia, medical conferences, specialty association meetings, etc. Provide the title of the presentation.
- Work experience: List major or medically related work, including a brief description of your responsibilities.
- Memberships: List the professional societies, organizations, or student groups with which you are associated. If you hold or have held any leadership positions in the organizations, so state.
- Outside or Volunteer Activities: Describe any community, outreach, or professional service activities to which you have given time.
- Personal: If you have any hobbies, interests, or special skills that might be of interest to a prospective residency program describe them here. Keep in mind that these need to be related to why you would be a good fit for the program.
As with the personal statement, your personal CV should be neat and free of spelling or grammatical errors. It is best printed on heavy bond paper by a laser printer.
Use only a single font with limited use of bold highlight (maybe just your name at the top of the page). Do NOT use all ALL CAPS anywhere.
Format the page with at least a 1-inch margin all the way around. If you require more than one page, put your name at the top of the second page. It is strongly recommended that you not use more than two pages.
Sample CV's are available at Optimal Resume.
