 One of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten in med school was that if you don't know what you want to do, go for the most competitive option. But when you're stuck spending hours studying and prepping for exams in med school, how in the world do you have time to actually build your CV? Let's break that down in today's episode. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician. And here at the MD journey, we make content to help people like you succeed on their medical journey, but doing it with less stress. Today, we're going to talk about and break down how to have a badass CV in preparations for residency, despite being a busy medical student. And if at any point during this episode, if you're enjoying the content, you're like, I want more where that came from, definitely recommend checking out some free resources, including our med school success handbook. It is a growing library of the lessons that I had when I was a medical student, things that I've now given when I was a physician, and essentially you can use to help yourself also become a top med student. So that'll be linked down below. And while you're checking out those free links down below, you'll also find resources and free courses on how to help yourself study, be more productive and so much more. So make sure you check out the links and description. Let's get into how to create a ridiculously amazing CV to make your chances of matching into your desired specialty much, much easier. Principle number one is the semester principle. Now this is the approach that I took when I was a med student and it actually worked really well because I matched into my number one IM spot. And I've essentially given this prescription to the other med students are trying to get into residency and they done pretty well for themselves as well. But the semester principle essentially says that your first semester of medical school, don't get too focused on trying to improve your residency CV. You still have plenty of time. I would use that first semester to find yourself at least two hours a week that you can then dedicate in future semesters to build the CV. And so what that means is that that first semester is going to be dedicated to helping you do things like how to become more efficient when you're studying, how to be more efficient with your time management, and essentially how to have two hours available to yourself without feeling like you're going to fail the test or the quiz. And if you're struggling finding a study strategy that works for you and you want to help, you can check out our free course, the study rehab course three steps that I teach all of my coaching students to help you have better grades, but doing it last time. And if at any point you're interested in working with myself and my team one on one to help you get better grades, you can check out the medic night program, which will be linked down below. But ideally that first semester, you find at least two hours that you improve through efficiency. This is a combination of maybe an hour or two during the week and then maybe a 30 minute or an hour session during the weekend. So then you can start doing activities in future semesters activities such as research, shadowing, volunteering, or anything that is related specifically to the specialty that you're interested in. So once you get through the first semester and you're like, cool, I got those two hours down. Now the question is, what do I do? Does the research of the shadowing is it doing volunteering? Like what is going to be the best thing for me on my CV? And really what I recommend is to really focus not on what you feel like you need, but what will move your story forward. I recently worked with a student who had no idea what they want to do. And I just simply asked him, if you just had to say one decision today that you're interested in exploring, you don't have to commit to what would you say? And the student said, I'm interested in looking into anesthesia. My response was beautiful. Let's just pretend like anesthesia is going to be a career for you. Since you don't know if you want to do it or not, it's not going to really make much sense to jump right into research. Maybe find faculty that you can start shadowing or doing clinical work with. So you can see, okay, this is for me or it's not. And so that's exactly what the students started to do. They started emailing a bunch of faculty and try to see who could let them follow them around for a day or a few weeks. And that starts to get the ball rolling. From the flip side, if you're a student who says, I kind of already know what I want to do because of x, y, and z, let's say you want to go into orthopedic surgery because you're an athlete, you enjoy surgery, you've had some experiences of med student or maybe during your college days, the next reasonable approach may say, okay, well, I need to figure out if I'm interested in research because I know that's important for getting into an orthopedic surgery residency. That is going to be a logical next step. Again, the entire goal is to build the story. Once you realize I like orthopedics or I love anesthesia, I love internal medicine because of x, y, and z, then try to find other experiences, whether it be through shadowing, whether it be through volunteering or whether it be through research and compliment those desires or possibly explore other avenues of that field you may not have enough exposure to. And so during the second or third semester, your goal should be to find one CV building project that progress your story. So again, if you had no idea what you want to do, ideally it's something that helps you understand this is for me or it's not for me. A personal experience, I thought I wanted to become an oncologist. In fact, I thought I was going to become a radiation oncologist. I spent maybe two to three semesters in medical school, first getting clinical exposure. I thought it was cool and doing research exposure. I thought it was neat and then doing more research and realizing this is not the field for me. And that is absolutely okay because I can tell a story where I can say, these are the things I liked about radiation oncology. And then I found out I didn't like these and I found that my likes for radiation oncology were also here in internal medicine. But the things that I didn't like about ratonk were now present internal medicine or not as much. And so this was a much better field. You can start to see how my story flows in that direction. Somebody can say, I understand how you made it this far. And as a quick pro tip, every CV building activity that you do, whether it be a research or following somebody around even for a day or any type of volunteering, simply note it down. Whether you're doing it on a word doc or doing it on Notion or doing it on Evernote or doing it on Google Docs, it doesn't matter. If you think that I'll remember three years down from the line, you never do. A good example is when you're applying to college, think about all the experiences you had to just think and like make up some nostalgic story of what the experience was actually like. Once you go through an experience, just quickly jot it down and then jot down your reflection on what you got from that event. So if you follow somebody around for a day, doing orthopedic surgery, what did you like? What did you not like? Put those down because then those same thoughts can go in your personal statement. They can go in your application, but essentially it'll become this really easy process of doing copy and paste when it's time to actually do your residency application. And the final note about your first CV activity or CV builder is to essentially ask as many mentors and as many projects before you commit to one. So it is okay to say, okay, cool, I'm going to decide their research is going to be the next logical path in my story and towards the pedic surgery, but I don't know what I want to do research in. So instead of just saying yes to the first person who offers you something, maybe see if you can email 10 people and see how many responses you get. And until you have a handful of maybe three to four responses, I would keep emailing people until you can say this seems like the most appropriate to my interest or to my skill set and time frame. So ideally you can have some publications or some kind of work or progress shown by time residencies around. I use that same approach in medical school to pick between two mentors where I picked one who looked like they're having a faster route of publication. And sure enough, I had multiple publications by the time. It was time for me to submit my residency application. So so far to summarize, we use our first or second semester to gain an extra two hours. We found one CV building activity that progressed your story. We reached out to multiple people depending on what activity we decided on doing until we committed to one. And now you essentially repeat the process. So first you have to find two more hours or replace those two hours that you did for activity number one and move it on to activity number two. But let's say you're still working on a research project. Now you have to become a little bit more efficient. You're studying even more so, but ideally you found after a year of doing this in a few semesters at certain activities such as watching lectures or going through a specific resource aren't that helpful. Maybe you can cut some time away out there and get some two hours and then you can use those two hours for activity number two. This can say, okay, I've done research. Now I'm going to do another research project or I'm going to follow that same mentor but on a clinical setting. So now I have some stories of clinical experiences for my personal statements and my applications and my interviews. You start to see how the student goes from I'm interested in orthopedics. I already have these clinical experiences. I'm going to do research and I really enjoyed my research. Now I'm going to do clinical experience related to that research and then that person looks like a much well put together applicant compared to somebody just said I did surgery as a third year. Orthopedics seemed cool. I did a rotation as a fourth year. I try to do some research at the very end. Please accept me. You can see how student number one is going to have a much easier time convincing somebody that they're interested in that respective specialty and thus increasing the chances of matching where they want to. Now how many experiences or research projects etc that you should work on really vary on a few things. One obviously the specialty that you want to go into. Something like classics and Durham may require a lot more research projects compared to something like family medicine. On the flip side also what your scores have been. So for example of your student who got a high step two score and you did really well on your rotations. You may not need as many experiences to say hey I want to do orthopedic surgery. I'm smart enough to do it. But if you're somebody who struggled or maybe not got the highest score and more experiences ideally will be able to tell you a more complete story even when the grades are not in your vapor. And if you're interested in learning about the averages for each different specialty go ahead and just type in in google nba chart outcomes you'll get a pdf. The most recent is probably from 2020 maybe there's a new one coming out that comes out every two to three years but essentially you can see at every specialty what their average step scores were average step two score was how many clinical experiences they had how many research projects they had. And again I emphasize that these are averages from people who are willing to actually share their results. So it may look skewed towards the higher end but just use that as some kind of basis and threshold of understanding what kind of work you relative have to do. Now so far we've talked about experiences that you're gaining over a semester so ideally you have three to four experiences in the specialty you're interested in but keep in mind you can be in a situation like myself where you decide on your ultimate field much later on and so you can use your initial story to say hey this is why I changed my mind but then maybe you do one or two experiences your last few semesters to then at least have something on your application. But now that we've finished talking about activities as well as importance of keeping personal notes of all of your experiences to help you write better personal statements the last thing that we have to touch on is how to get amazing recommendation letters. Now most of these will probably come from your clinical rotation so I will link down below the videos and playlists on how to just crush it on your clinical rotations and if you're on your rotations or if you haven't done so already and you're interested a few of the resources I recommend checking out is either our domination bundle which includes essentially how to succeed on every phase of your medical journey including all your rotations or our crushing clinical course which I'll break down that's essentially how to become an honors to you not each of your shelves and rotations to look impressive and essentially get letters of recommendations offered to you instead of asking for them. But whenever you're on a rotation and you're working with the faculty it is important that you do start to build some kind of rapport with them it's going to be easier said than done with some attendings where some of them are going to be much more bubbly or interested in working with students but once you find an opportunity I have a good relationship with this attending make sure you work your butt off during that rotation that doesn't mean be a kiss up but learn about your patients learn and give feedback on your presentations taking care of the patients your management decisions and ask them how you're doing constantly a physician who sees a student who is interested in growing and then they also know your backstory of why you want to go into orthopedic surgery or internal medicine is going to fight for you when it comes to that letter so the best thing you can do for yourself is to pay attention okay how can I make sure I work hard for all of my attendings and whenever you have those instances of an attending who reciprocates their attention back towards you that is a signal that this is going to be a great person to possibly write me a letter when make sure I just work my butt off during these next few weeks and make sure that I leave a lasting impression always ask for feedback make those corrections ask for feedback again and eventually ask for that letter and if you can combine this entire package with experiences that are built and focused around a story experiences that also have mental notes in real time that you can then transfer to your personal statements your application and then people who are willing to back you up based off of the experiences they've had with you on rotations or research experience you've set yourself up aside from just doing well on step two we have more videos you guys can check out on the channel about those you've set yourself up to have a really impressive residency application and that is essentially all you can do the rest of it is in the control of other people make sure that you take control of those so again if you have any questions about how to prepare for residency especially with match day just going by about a week ago as I'm making of this video let me know in the comment section down below if you guys are interested in any of the resources that I mentioned go ahead and check out the link down below including our med school success handbook as well as the clinical rotations and if you have any questions add your comments down below if you did get some value out of this episode go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button and notification bell if you're listening to this as a podcast I'd love it if you quickly just hit that subscribe or follow on your favorite platform as well as just taking a second just a second to go to iTunes and leaving an honest review super appreciative if you do so but as always my friends thanks for being a part of my journey hopefully that was a little help to you guys on yours if you did enjoy this episode check out this episode right here on how I study medicine as a full-time physician as well as this episode right here on how to use Anki like a pro everyone's loved this video you guys can check it out too and until then I'll see you guys in the next one peace