Conquer the MATCH

The Personal Statement

Good starting point for residency personal statements. I know that it says "Fellowship," but work with Residency personal statements too. Highly recommend a minimum of 3 months working on your personal statement. Personally, I went through 5+ drafts before finalizing my personal statement. Click below if you would like to see what my personal statement looked like.

Hiro's Personal Statement

The Anatomy of a Fellowship Personal Statement.pdf

What NOT To Do

Start 4th year with no idea of what you want to do
Have no idea what you want to do and not apply broadly
Decide at the last minute that you will go for a geographic match after not applying broadly
Only get the minimum number of LORs (I only got 3 FM LORs and I think they were mediocre at best)
- Get LORs from EVERY attending if you can. Remember that you can pick and choose which LORs you send to programs. Also, a lot of attendings will tell you if you did well and if they plan to write you a good LOR.
- Also, you never know what will happen your 3rd year. Maybe you started medical school and wanted to go IM, but you did that one ortho rotation and fell in love with it. Don't regret not getting an LOR from that ortho rotation or general surgery rotation. Have it in your pocket if that moment arises that you need it.
Here what I did on my first MATCH cycle:
- Applied to 16 FM programs
- Interviewed at 6 programs
- Ranked 2 programs
- Outcome: did not match

Improve Your Match Odds

What I did on my second MATCH cycle:
- Applied to 49 programs (37 FM and 12 IM)
- 15 interview invites (10 FM, 5 IM)
- Went to 13 interviews (if you are in a transitional year program, can be hard to get to interviews because you will most likely have to take vacation time and may not be able to take vacation on medicine months depending on the program)
- Ranked 9 programs (still geographically regardless of specialty)
  - #1 IM, #2-5 FM, #6-8 IM, #9 FM all with increasing radius from my preferred location
- Outcome: matched to my #1
Other things I did right
- Got LORs from every attending I did a rotation with the remainder of my medical school career
  - PM&R, Orthopedic Surgery, Family Medicine
- Got LORs from every attending I thought I did well with for the first few months of my transitional year program
- Picked LORs to send from people who actually told me they would write me stellar LORs
  - Programs actually told me this time that my LORs were exceptional
- Revamped my personal statement using the outline above

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