Step 2 CK  will still be reported as a numeric score, which still gives IMGs an area in which to shine. However, IMGs must note that until January 2022, the very importance of Step 1 and Step 2 CK scores dictates that any IMG who plans to be a serious contender must have solid Step scores. In other words, having competitive Step scores is an expectation, so it is not enough to distinguish you from other applicants. It doesn’t work in your favor to have a single-minded focus on excelling in the Step exams and relaxing thereafter.

There are other aspects of your application that Program Directors and the selection committee consider when they have to determine who they will invite to interviews and who they will rank highly. These include your letters of recommendation, your Medical School Program Evaluation (MSPE), your personal statement, and your perceived commitment to your specialty. Regardless of where each of these falls on the list of what programs are looking for, as an IMG, none of them can be lacklustre.

Do your very best on your Step exams, but don’t fall into the trap of neglecting other key aspects of your application process, including:

• networking
• carefully selecting and equipping those who will advocate for you on paper
• presenting yourself in a professional, memorable manner on paper
• advocating for yourself with ease during interviews 

In the words of one of our favorite IMG clients, programs view the quality of your application as a representation of how much effort you put into tasks. I like to say that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression! Therefore, the most important part of your residency application as an IMG is every part.  At every single stage of the process, you must seek to distinguish yourself; you must be memorable for being uniquely valuable.

To get our one-on-support with your match application, email the word “MATCH” to shawna (at) memorableessay.com.

The post This is the Most Important Part of Your Residency Application appeared first on Memorable Essay.

So you’re sitting there, thinking that it’s time to get your ERAS application started. 

Or maybe you have already started but it’s gobbling up so much of your time, because you’ve spent three hours requesting letters of recommendation, ten hours trying to figure out what to say in your personal statement, and ten more hours rummaging through your brain for content to put on your CV. 

Completing your ERAS Application doesn’t have to stress you out or take hours of your time,  trying to brainstorm, from scratch what you are going to say in your personal statement, then what you’ll say in your CV and LORs. This is an inefficient strategy if you want to get your application completed in a timely manner! 

You can save time, without compromising the quality of your application by implementing our proven secret strategy:

Create one robust message capturing your story and what you have to offer—what sets you apart from the others. Then use this message as a guide when creating each component of your application.

This is your Main Message, and it’s the secret sauce I have used to help IMGs match over the last 6 years. If you don’t have a Main Message, you need to stop and make one.

To get all of the information necessary for your Main Message, you must answer three broad questions:

1. Why do you want to match into residency training in this specialty?

You must be able to articulate the reasons you’re interested in this specialty, what made you think of applying for it, and what you’d like to achieve once you get into that specific residency program.

2. Why are you worthy to join this program?

This is the Million Dollar Question because programs want to have people who can bring something of value to their program. If you don’t know why you’re worthy, Ambitious IMG, neither will those programs you’re hoping will invite you to interview.

3. What is your unique value proposition?

This is the most important part of any Main Message. It is something that you are 100% sure that no other applicant can say about themselves.

Save time and energy as you complete your residency application ( there are already so many other things you have to do) by creating a Main Message before you do anything else.

Until next time,

Be Memorable!

To get our one-on-support with your match application, email the word “MATCH” to shawna (at) memorableessay.com.

The post How to Save Hours On Your Residency Match Application appeared first on Memorable Essay.

These struggles may come in the form of negative emotions like feeling nervous, overwhelmed, or you may just feel downright lost. That’s okay. 

Here are some things you can focus on to move forward. 

1. Get Clear: Get clear about who you are, where you’re taking your medical career, and why you’re taking it in that direction. As simple as this sounds, it is critical that you take time to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. Why do you want to get into internal medicine and not pediatrics? Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Clarity of purpose will help you know “Your Why”, and knowing “Your Why” put you a step ahead of most.

2. Strategize: After you get a clear vision of what you want and why you want it, you must now make some moves. You have a vision of where you’re going and you need to impose that vision on the world.

A strategic plan is a play-by-play and day-to-day guide of what you must do to get from where you are to where you want to be. Having a strategy will give you confidence, help you work on your application in a paced manner, and give you direction.  

3. Get Support: Most amazing feats cannot be achieved alone. Figure out the parts of your process that you’re struggling with, like organizing it all, coming up with a strategy, mastering your Step exams, creating your personal statement and CV, interviewing, then seek help from people who have a track record of doing these things well. 

Everyone won’t match on their first try. Not every Ambitious IMG will match. However, you can increase your odds of matching on your first attempt, and doing so without feeling nervous, overwhelmed, and lost as you put together your application by:

• being clear about your why you must pursue your match goal to the end 
• having a strategic plan to get your application done 
• getting help will increase your chances of getting the outcome you want.

The post Do These 3 Things As You Work On Your Residency Application appeared first on Memorable Essay.

These include the ability to:

• make a strategic plan
• build key relationships
• push through external resistance
• overcome internal resistance like self-doubt and imposter syndrome

However, no skill is more important than self-advocacy. Self-advocacy is the ability to stand up for yourself and the things that are important to you.

To be a self-advocate, you need to:

1. Constantly “look inside yourself” and become clear about what you want for yourself
2. Develop and carry out a plan to help you get the vision you have for yourself
3. Push through any internal or external obstacle until you get to what you want

This may sound like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be! Take small steps.

To help you become a better self-advocate during your match journey, you need to ask yourself one question every day: “How did I advocate for myself today?”

Since matching as an IMG will require that you become a staunch self-advocate , asking yourself these seven words,  “How did I advocate for myself today?”, will change the trajectory of your life. 

So, how did you advocate for yourself today?

• Did you sit and decide why you are going to match no matter what (or are you still “okay” with the idea of not matching)?
• Did you create a calendar for the week with protected times for studying and working on your application (or are you still prioritizing other people’s priorities)?
• Did you seek help for your USMLE prep or did you keep struggling on your own?
• Did you neglect to reschedule your Step date even though you’re not scoring how you want to, and you can feel you are not prepared?
• Did you stick to your work schedule for your application or did you allow yourself to be distracted?
• Did you ask a colleague who matched into a program you like to chat with you for 15 minutes, or are you still wondering from afar how they got in because you don’t want to bother them?
• Did you guide the person writing your Letter of Recommendation, or are you just hoping they give you an excellent letter?
• Did you seek help with putting together your personal statement and CV, or did you keep struggling with them alone?
• Did you send your programs Thank You notes in which you subtly addressed a question you fumbled on during the interview, or did you just give up on amending your mistake?

Asking yourself, “How did I advocate for myself today? at the end of every day will force you to re-evaluate your daily performance as it relates to your goal of matching. 

Asking this question also allows you to see how you can advocate for yourself tomorrow and make good use of new opportunities to do better!

Tell us in the comments, how did you advocate for yourself today?

The post Do You Have This Skill, Ambitious IMG? appeared first on Memorable Essay.

“Doing extensive research into the curriculum ahead of enrollment is a critical step in being well prepared for absorbing and managing your MPH academics.”

Tigest Tamrat is a Consultant at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Department of Reproductive Health and Research headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, where she focuses on digital health innovations and their impact on reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (RMNCAH). A Master of Public Health in Epidemiology (2012) from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health helped lay the foundation for her daily work. Here she shares countless gems from her MPH journey.

ME: Tigest, thank you for taking the time to give us a behind-the-scenes look at your educational and professional paths. Let’s start with your “why”.  What was your single biggest motivation for pursuing an MPH?

Tigest: For my undergraduate degree, I had majored in history at a liberal arts college. As with most students who have ties to their home country, I knew I wanted to do something that would bring about practical change and impact lives. However, I was always confronted with questions about how I would apply my degree in a meaningful way to achieve those humanist ambitions.

I had always gravitated towards medicine and truly wanted to contribute to this field, but I knew that I could not stomach the blood and gore.  Immediately after graduating with my first degree, I worked at a medical organization in Ethiopia, my home country, and was involved in a lot of non-clinical yet public health activities, including coordinating nutrition programs, facilitating births at health facilities and understanding stopgap measures that can be taken for home-based births, responding to health needs of incoming refugees, and controlling issues sparked by water-related illnesses.

While being a physician is critical in these situations, there were also many other structural and systematic challenges that needed to be addressed. My liberal arts degree was useful in helping me to analyze contexts and articulate ideas in the form of proposals, but I also had to read and educate myself a lot on clinical protocols and health management. After two years of stretching out my history degree, I knew that there were limits to what could be self-taught, as well as that I needed to have the appropriate credentials to be taken seriously in a such a clinical and professional field.  An MPH seemed like a good fit for equipping me with the necessary tools for moving my career to the next phase.

ME: Yes. That took me some time to realize as well, but working on structural and systematic healthcare frameworks, like being a physician, can lead to practical and lasting change. It can be a relieving epiphany for healthcare lovers who think “big picture” or who don’t like “blood and gore”.
So when you were at Columbia, what was the most surprising outcome of your studies?

Tigest: I realized that I actually didn’t know what I was getting into and should have explored the different departments prior to enrolling. MPH programs are not monolithic, and there are various departments and study tracks. In addition to the uniqueness of the topic areas, these different study tracks also have their own implications on employment opportunities and types of exposures in practicums.  I studied Epidemiology and going in, I just thought it was about disease control and learning clinical procedures.  It was in fact very data/statistics heavy, which ended up being useful and made me feel a bit more marketable than peers from other departments.  However, I think doing extensive research into the curriculum ahead of enrollment is a critical step in being well prepared for absorbing and managing your MPH academics.

ME: That is priceless advice! It’s so important to truly understand all that is on offer at a graduate school before you apply. Interview alums from as many departments and tracks as you can, go to open days, sit in on classes, look over syllabi, look at the skills required for entry-level jobs in your field, and understand the trends in your field and which skills you will need to be marketable—or management material—years from now. And once you enroll, don’t hesitate to switch if you realize another department or track can better equip you to crush your short- and long-term goals.

Speaking of alums. Now that you are out of school, tell me: How has your master’s degree helped you in your professional life?

Tigest: My master’s degree has provided concrete skills that have translated to my work.  My immediate job following my MPH was a research manager for an adolescent health program, and this role required operating an SPSS statistical package and monitoring data on implementation efforts.  Having this degree essentially made me the core person for producing all related data for informing implementations and evaluating the effects of our interventions. The degree has also been important for empowering me to be in relatively senior roles for leading public health research and managing large-scale interventions.

ME: That is exactly what you wanted — the appropriate credentials to be taken seriously. I am glad that you are already leading.

For those on their MPH journey as we speak, what would you advise them to do in order to finish strong?

Tigest’s 5 Tips For Finishing Your Master of Public Health (MPH)

1. Find a professor or faculty member to whom you can reach out for guidance and mentorship:
I know this may seem easier said than done, but this is literally what got me through graduate school.  At the end of my second semester, I had to a do a thesis and was essentially left on my own to figure out a topic, obtain a dataset, and identify reviewers. This was a similar experience across other peers.  What helped me was finding a faculty member who could point me to areas for getting a dataset, someone who was willing to review and give me feedback on ideas for my thesis topic.

2. Take advantage of the chance to be placed in a practicum:
It doesn’t need to be for a long duration, but having an international placement early on can not only establish good networks for future employment, but also help you to reflect on what exactly you want to get out of the MPH.  There are a lot of critical managerial life skills that an MPH academic program cannot teach, so a practicum and any related work opportunities will be important for shaping what you want to get out of your MPH.

3. Form/join a study group:
I like to study by myself, but having a small group of peers in your cohort is really helpful for reviewing your work and just keeping everyone abreast of updates that someone may miss.  For example, a professor may have posted a useful resource, and the study group may help to make sure you don’t miss updates.  It’s also great to have different perspectives to tackle assignments and discuss topics that may further stimulate interests.

4. Do your best and challenge yourself with new courses and campus research jobs:
This seems pretty obvious, but use the MPH opportunity to learn about new areas that you may not have otherwise had in mind. A lot of my current work now focuses on the use of digital technologies for health. During my MPH, I worked off campus at a research lab on digital technologies, something that I was very much unaware of prior to my academic program.  Dipping my toes into this completely new area ended up serving me well and opening a completely new area of health interests that I ever imagined.

5. Take advantage of guest lectures and nonacademic opportunities provided by your MPH program:
One of the great things about an on-campus MPH program versus an online program is that you can be exposed to events and high-profile visitors who are invited to deliver lectures and presentations.

ME: Whew! That was more like a masterclass on how to get the most out of your master’s studies! Top-notch, actionable strategy. Thank you, Tigest.

At the WHO, Tigest Tamrat facilitated the development of a mobile health assessment and planning for scale toolkit and other resources targeting the global digital health community. Previously, Tigest served as a research officer coordinating multi-country adolescent and reproductive health programs at the Population Council based in Ethiopia. In addition to an MPH, she holds a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College.

The post Get The Most Out Of Your MPH: Tigest’s Masterclass appeared first on Memorable Essay.

Recommendations function somewhat as testimonials; they are written by people who have had a chance to assess your work over some extended period. Your recommendations should advocate for you.

Here are four tips for getting a strong recommendation:

1. Choose recommenders you trust—people who will portray you in a strong and positive light, and take the time to write something unique, relevant and grammatically correct. The best recommenders are people who feel personally invested in the outcome of your application.

2. Make it easy for your recommenders to pen a stellar letter—give them plenty of time to write! High school teachers will be busy in September, so go ahead and approach them before you leave school in May. Your former college professors may be busy with research or travel, so reconnect with them at least six months before you need a letter and let them know of your intentions.

3. Guide your recommenders. As I once heard someone say, “Who is more suited to toot your own horn than you?” You should have thoroughly researched the opportunity you are interested in and understood why it is perfectly suited to your goals, and why you deserve to win it. Communicate your selling points to your recommender; the most convenient way to do this is by talking with them, and then giving them a ‘brag sheet’ with bullet points of your relevant accomplishments as well as a copy of your resume or CV.

4. When getting more than one recommendation, approach people who can speak to different strengths. For example, if applying to a liberal arts institution that values students with broad interests, secure a recommendation from teachers who can speak to your strengths in disparate disciplines, e.g., in the arts and sciences. If applying to graduate school, approach someone who can speak to your academic prowess and someone else who can speak to your impact in professional settings.

BONUS : Don’t forget to thank your recommenders! One, it is thoughtful. Two, you might find yourself asking them to write on your behalf again and again.

Which strategies have you used to secure stellar recommendations?

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