Campus Connection

You have made it this far: You are in graduate school and on the verge of graduating.  To get to this point, you have convinced your mentors that you have what it takes to move on to the next level: skills, potential, brain cells.  You are now ready to leave your comfort zone of the university where you’ve resided over the past few years and take the first steps along the daunting interview trail. While experience is the best teacher, the lessons we learn from other people’s experiences save us time. Following is a summary of the three lessons I learned along the interview trail while applying for a residency that may be useful to you when you are writing your CVs, preparing your applications, and getting ready to interview.

First, the application needs to be interesting.  In medical school (or any graduate program), everyone has taken the same courses.  Some people’s grades are better than others, but your CV is going to look like a template unless you emphasize what you do that makes you better-suited for a position than your classmate or any other candidate.

Let me share my experience to illustrate.  I started my application by copying and pasting my information into the medical school-approved CV template.  After showing a copy of my one-page report to a faculty member at another institution, he said it was, in essence, crap.  I went back and included small paragraphs about my research experience, brief explanations of the awards I received, and filled out my interests section.  (By the way, I highly recommend showing your CV to trusted professors).

How did this pay off? At one university, I was interviewed by five people, with each of whom I had something in common.  In each interview, I was asked about an entirely different aspect of my CV.  In one, I was asked about my experience in Judo since the interviewer had been in Jujitsu. In the next interview, my interviewer and I talked about my interest in computer animation and how it could be applied to the interviewer’s research projects. In another we talked about the medical history in Baltimore, as the interviewer had once lived in Baltimore and was herself a historian. 

The bottom line is that you should not skimp on the CV.  Balance and focus your CV in order to add just enough to avoid the simple outline approach, but not so much that your CV seems more like an autobiography. Try to include enough so that your personal history and interests can be a starting point for conversation between you and your interviewer. More importantly, filling out your CV can help you and your interviewer to find that you share common ground.  In his book How to Become CEO: The Rules for Rising to the Top of Any Organization, Jeffrey Fox points out that a good CEO is a person who has gained enough life experience in many different fields because that person can interact intelligently with all her/his employees no matter what their specialty.  Each of us has interesting aspects of our lives due to our different career experiences, personal interests, and hobbies. Your job is to highlight them in your CV. The interviewer will only ask you about them if a) they are also interested in that aspect of you, and b) you include it in your application.

The second lesson is to define yourself.  Try to project what kind of employee you will be and make that your application theme.  Again, I use myself as an example.  I started doing research because someone early in my undergraduate career told me that research was the best way to gain exposure to medicine.  Now I can't seem to get enough of research and my goal is to stay in research.  So, in my personal statement portion of my application (similar to the cover letter), I emphasized my research past, my current research interests, and that the reason I applied to their fine university is so that I could continue to do top quality research.  I was not invited to interview at places that didn't value research, even if I chose to apply there.  In the end, everyone with whom I interviewed talked to me about my research and how I would fit in at their university. 

Research was my theme.  Your theme may be different.  You are you and you have done extensive you-type things. Point out what makes you that phenomenal ______er (fill in the blank with your theme) and when you are accepted for the job, you will be valued for exactly who you are and what you love to do.

The third lesson is something we all know but need to hear again: You cannot be everything to everyone.  A major outcome from applying lesson one and two is that those who do not identify with you or value your theme will not invite you to interview.  I really wanted to visit some of the places where I applied, but I was not invited.  I don't know their reasons for not inviting me, but I must take comfort in knowing that if I have little in common with the faculty there and my theme is not consistent with their idea of a good candidate, I would not have been happy there. It is not worth getting down and dwelling on exactly what their reasons for not inviting me were. There are people like you everywhere who want to hire someone just like you because you remind them of themselves. They like themselves and who they’ve become and those are the kinds of people who will overlook any of your flaws, or see them as a result of life experiences and empathize.  Trying to be the perfect candidate for everyone is futile and self-defeating. Just focus on finding the perfect fit for you. People like you will want you to work with them.

To summarize what I’ve said: define yourself, then be your whole self, and nothing but yourself, despite yourself.   Fill out your CV enough to get an interview and connect with the interviewers, and identify for yourself an overriding theme that you want them to remember you by.  Then, determine where you want to be and try to find the places that suit your goals instead of trying to be the ideal candidate for every place you interview. Finally, be proud of yourself! There are no second chances for first impressions, so be the best version of yourself you can be for each of your interviews.

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