I have been asked this question many times, “what can we do during our MBBS to make our CV?”. It depends on which year are you in. There are lots of things that you can do during your medical school days to improve your CV which are but not limited to:

1. Research
2. Oral presentations
3. Poster presentations
4. Voluntary social work
5. Learn Spanish
6. Improvise on your extracurricular skills

USMLE WORLD: Ideal strategy and don’ts for your USMLE preparation

Note: The best iOS app for USMLE preparation – Dailyrounds.

The performance in your medical school matters a lot. Some places even ask for your GPA during your medical school in the application of your clinical electives (like Memorial Sloan Kettering), many of the students get involved in making their CV so much that they stop giving importance of reading text books during their MBBS days, including myself. Trust me, in the long run, the textbooks you studied during your MBBS days will matter the most. I have seen people with low scores get into University hospital programs (SUNY upstate) just because of their grades during medical school. I have also another friend of mine who was a University topper in Agha Khan University and got a “pre match” in a well reputed program, another one got a surgery interview call from John Hopkins just because of her medical school performance. I ignored this fact for a very long until I realized after the match day, that your grades during medical school matters. So I advise you to focus on your textbooks as it is the only time you will get to read textbooks of the specialty other than the one in which you are going to.

During interviews, we have been asked this question many times: “Why did you want to be a doctor?” and we, without any speck of hesitation reply the same thing over and over, “I want to serve mankind”, “I want to help people” and “I always wanted to interact with people and heal them”. Every interviewer knows where our answers are coming from. Mostly, it is from a book for interview preparation that we bought from some Barnes and Noble store in NY but our CV says otherwise. I showed my CV to many program directors before applying for match and asked them what is lacking in my CV. They told me that my CV doesn’t reflect how much I love being a doctor. I asked what they meant by that. To which they replied that most of the American graduates participate in many social events and volunteer with many relief programs to show that they care for humanity and want to serve mankind for the rest of their lives.

Many of us proudly write our forcibly contribution to “Polio Ravivar” as our volunteer social work or even a unit of blood we donated in a random camp as our service to mankind. I have been told personally by many program directors that they take these things very seriously and negatively. They know it’s a big joke in the name of social work. If you haven’t done any notable social work, then don’t mention anything at all.

What you can do is, whenever there is a requirement for voluntary doctors in a natural disaster area, you can go and help. Many Red Cross societies and other NGOs keep managing events in which you can contribute to help the poor and needy. You can use the skills you gained in your MBBS to help others, which will count.

Learning a new language is always interesting but many of us lose this interest in the first 10 days of learning a new language. In most of the states of America, a huge proportion of populations is Hispanic and you will be interacting with lots of patients who can’t speak English, hence, you need a Spanish interpreter to communicate with them. But what if you didn’t need an interpreter and you knew Spanish yourself? That will be a huge plus. In programs like Bronx lebanon hospital, Metropolitan hospital, Harlem hospital in New York, the first question they asked from many friends of mine is, “Do you speak Spanish?”

It’s a major plus if you know Spanish, no matter which specialty or program you are interested in.

Tip: There is an app called “Duolingo” from where you can learn Spanish every day for 10-15 minutes.

This is a very important thing which I am going to tell you; nobody asks you about the management of Diabetic ketoacidosis, first line antibiotic for UTI in pregnancy, or steps of laparoscopic hemicolectomy in your interview. Most of the people who are being interviewed at a place are equal, in terms of their grades. They don’t ask any medical questions because that part was already done by our beasts called USMLEs. During your interview, they want to know about you outside the field of medicine, example: what are your hobbies? , What do you do in your free time? What do you do to relieve your stress? How can they be sure that you won’t kill yourself by the stress of residency and they will need to find a new resident for your replacement (Just Kidding). You might not give importance to it now but I am going to share few interview experiences of my friends and of myself that clearly reflect how much they are interested in you as a person, and not as a doctor.

One of my friends wrote in his CV that he likes performing magic with a pack of cards, and boom, there was a pack of cards on the table during his interview. He didn’t lie about it on his CV and impressed them during the interview, got matched at that place later on.

Another friend of mine wrote that he liked break-dancing and that he was really good at it. When he entered the room during his interview, the program director cleared all the chairs, tables and asked him to dance. He danced so well that the program director invited his colleagues. They all enjoyed his dance and he got matched in that program.

They want to know what you are good at, besides medicine. I have met pilots, national boxers, singers, dancers, photographers, professional trekkers during my interview trail and I used to get inferiority complex by talking to them, given that most of the medical students in India are only good at learning medicine from books.

In the end, I want to say that you should familiarize yourself with the US culture, watch American TV shows, Hollywood movies etc. Try to watch football, play soccer so that when you interact with them during your electives, you will be able to understand their jokes.

Importance of research work

The match is becoming competitive year by year and so is the importance of research. This question has been asked by many students from me, “Is research only needed for competitive specialties?”.  After my match experience, I must say that importance of research has been increasing for every specialty now. The basic question is, how to start with research, when one has zero basic knowledge about research.

There are so many questions in your minds, to whom I should approach ? Is ICMR STS student scholarship project good enough? What kind of research ?

Case report

This is your first step in the field of research, no matter how small but first step is always important. This is usually a rare patient, your mentors might have seen during their practice and they don’t get enough time to report it. Your role comes there.

This is your chance of showing your commitment for something big waiting for you in the future. It is very important to search everything about writing a case report online. This experience will teach you to write an article, methods of referencing/citing other articles, article submission procedure, multiple rLet’s begin:

The basic step to start research work is to first identify which speciality you want to go in. There is no point of doing research in paediatrics if you want to go for Internal Medicine.

The next step is, to find professors in the department of your speciality of interest on google who are actively publishing articles in international journals, gather all the information about their current research projects going on in that particular department.

Next step after identifying the professor of your interest, is to download his last 5 years publications from pubmed, read thoroughly about his current research projects going on, try to gather all the information about his topic of interest from textbooks, pubmed, google.

Now, schedule an appointment with that professor in his/her free time to talk about your interest in research, don’t take it lightly, your first interaction with him/her is going to decide if he/she will be interested in you working for him/her. It is very important to explain to them about your ideas, your purpose for research, you future goals, your plans of doing residency from US (they might know someone in the US who might be doing research with him in collaboration)

Then ask them if you can contribute in one of their ongoing research projects, it is very difficult to get involved in their research projects as they are on big scale and you are a beginner. They usually first give you a CASE REPORT to work on and you go from there.

I am pretty sure that, after you get your first case report published, you will be familiar with using pubmed, review of literature, use of citation softwares like (Endnote), searching appropriate journals for your article and final submission process.

Original article/study

Once you show your mentor your potential, your hard work and your real interest in research, they might give you a study that you can first author. It’s a huge thing and the real time to prove your potential. Even a single study published with you as a first author, in an international pubmed indexed journal will work for you. During this time, you will learn data collection, data analysis and data presentation that will help you for the rest of your life.

Statistics are very important to learn, at this stage, that will not only help you in your research work but also for all the USMLE step 1, USMLE step 2Ck and even USMLE step 3 questions. This is the time to master few statistical softwares which include but not only limited to SPSS, Stata, Endnote etc.

Based on the research you publish this time, and the complexity of statistics involved, you can ask for research positions in the US or even work on a research project going in USA while you are in India (that’s what I did).

ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research)   

I agree that ICMR is the basic research and the first research project of your life but according to my experience, I have seen students including myself who involve in basic science research projects (Pathology, Pharmacology and Microbiology) for 2 months and they are ready to work on any topic in the world. The best thing would be to select your topic of interest early in life and keep publishing articles on that article such that by the time of match, you would have more information about a particular topic than the program director who will be taking your interview.

The other thing I have seen, is that most people just involve in a project and submit them in 2 months and then forget about it. Even the head of ICMR once said to me that : “Unpublished research is like NO research at all ”. Even if you are getting involved in ICMR project, make a good judgement if it is good enough to get published, otherwise, it would just be a waste of time and later on you will realize that you could have done independent work during that time which would have been much easier to get published.

Indian research published in Indian Journals?

Many students ask me that if a research article published in indian journals are recognized in USA? My answer to that question is: it’s not about the country of origin of journals but about the “Impact factor”, “pubmed indexing” and “citation index”.

One of my articles, published in Tropical gastroenterology which is an Indian journal but, it is recognized internationally such that, people even from Harvard submit their articles to publish in this journal.

In the end, I must say that diseases which are more common in tropical countries, procedures invented by doctors in our country, management protocol given by our doctors, their data would be more authentic even if it is from India than other countries where the prevalence of the disease is low.

Review article/ Meta-analysis

This is the highest form of research one can do as a medical student. Once you are thorough with you review of literature, data analysis (statistic) and article writing skills, you can get the opportunity of writing, a review article or doing a meta-analysis. It is not impossible to do meta-analysis, I am a co-author myself, of two published meta-analysis. Don’t listen to anyone who says that meta-analysis is impossible in India.

The first thing, after mastering your research skills is to search about “Cochrane“ or go to one of the workshops conducted by them very often. They have high impact factor of 6.25 and they let you do the meta-analysis if you form your own team.

The best thing about meta-analysis is that, you don’t need any patient data, all the data is already on the internet published by other studies. You can just sit in a room and analyse the data of many RCTs into a meta-analysis.

Cochrane has a software “Revman” which is called Review manager that does all the statistical work. You just need to know what statistical test to apply for which comparisons.

There are many youtube tutorials and “Cochrane handbook of review article” online to learn about meta-analysis conducted under cochrane.

You can also also visit “Cochrane library” to search for already published meta-analysis, download them and read them to get an idea about what is the structure of a cochrane published meta-analysis.

Oral presentation/Poster presentation

Once you are involved in research projects, you should have a desire to present them to the audience in the form of oral or poster presentation. The key point is to remain active in various facebook pages like MEDICON, MEDSICON, AIIMS conferences which updates you about the various conferences going on in the areas around you. Try to participate in as many conferences you can and present your research in any form either oral or poster in those conferences. No matter how small your research is, and no matter how many times you have presented that research in other conferences earlier, this will help you in the long term. It will not only improve your presentation skills but also will give you the confidence to present a much bigger research at a much bigger platform in the near future and at that time, it won’t be your first time to present your research. Every presentation you make counts in your CV so take a good note of dates and place where you did all the presentations. During these conferences, where many international faculty members visit, try to connect with professors from USA and try to share your ideas with them, who knows if someone is a program director from a big shot program, you will be applying in the near future. One of my friends did the same during one of the conferences at Apollo, Delhi and the US professor was so impressed by his work he did while he was in india, that he funded his tuition fee for MPH in infectious department of Yale.

“Opportunities are everywhere you just need to look for them”

Also read,

The best iOS app for USMLE preparation – Dailyrounds by Neuroglia Health Private Limited..

Top 10 medical apps for doctors in Google playstore.

USMLE WORLD: Ideal strategy and don’ts for your USMLE preparation

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