How To Make Your Medical School Resume Stand Out

Recently, our CEO, Dr. Behrouz Moemeni, was interviewed by U.S. News & World Report about his expert opinion on what it takes to make a medical school resume, CV, or list of activities stand out.

One of the main topics of discussion was the ability of the applicant to show “commitment and progression,” rather than including a list of seemingly-random activities just to fill up all possible spaces available.

This is important because the path to becoming an excellent medical doctor is challenging, long, and expensive. Therefore, admissions committees would want to select applicants that have specific set of qualities, such as resilience, self-improvement (progression), and long-term commitment.

"But, how do you show commitment and progression over time in a medical school resume?"

It’s actually a lot simpler than most students realize.

Firstly, to show commitment, you must only include activities that show participation that lasted years, rather than a few weeks or months (with a few exceptions, depending on the impact and significance of the activity). This shows the admissions committees that you were genuinely interested in the activities you decided to showcase in your resume, because it’s hard to stick to any activity in the long run, if you are not actually interested.

Secondly, to show progression, you want to highlight activities that started out as junior positions and progressed to more senior roles over time. For example, let’s say you first started a position in a laboratory as an assistant and gradually progressed to becoming an independent researcher with a publication. Or, let’s say you were involved in a university club as a student liaison and moved up to become the president of the club. These clearly demonstrate progression over time, not just in title, but in the associated responsibilities taken on, in the complexity of duties performed, and - ostensibly - in the trust invested in you by others who facilitated such progression.

For a specific example that our CEO discussed with U.S. News & World Report, click here to access the full report by U.S. News (this opens the link in a new tab so you can come back to this page easily after). Scroll down the page and see the annotation beside "2015 - Senior Consultant". Here, the student is showing that they went from the role of a "Senior Consultant" to "Assistant Program Manager" in the same organization. The descriptions next to these roles in the resume clearly demonstrate additional commitments, increased responsibilities, and greater self-direction and autonomy, all of which are hallmarks of progression.

To your success,

Your friends at BeMo

BeMo Academic Consulting