Developing Your Medical CV

A curriculum vitae (CV) is a comprehensive record of your education, experiences, and professional accomplishments. Throughout medical school, you may be asked to provide a CV when applying for research opportunities, clinical rotations, professional organizations, scholarships or awards, and residency programs. Begin developing your CV early and review it regularly to ensure it remains accurate and current.

The resources on this page are designed specifically for medical students. Students are encouraged to begin with a standard medical student CV template as a guide for organizing and formatting their CV. As you progress through medical school, your CV should evolve to reflect your individual experiences, accomplishments, and professional development.

Transitioning from a Premedical to a Medical CV

For first-year medical students, one of the greatest challenges is deciding which experiences from a premedical CV remain relevant. Not everything that strengthened your medical school application needs to remain on your CV throughout medical school.

Generally, continue to include experiences related to education, research, teaching, clinical work, leadership, and significant professional accomplishments. Routine undergraduate honors, such as Dean’s List recognition, and older community service activities can typically be removed as more relevant medical school experiences are added. Exceptional honors or distinctions—particularly national awards or professional recognition—may remain appropriate.

Maintaining a Professional CV

Your CV is an important reflection of your professional identity and should be carefully maintained. It should be:

• Clear, concise, and well organized

• Consistent in formatting, font, style, and chronology

• Accurate and free of spelling or grammatical errors

• Completely honest, without exaggeration, duplication, or embellishment

• Updated regularly as you gain new experiences and accomplishments

Before using your CV for an application or professional opportunity, seek feedback from trusted mentors, faculty members, career advisors, or other experienced reviewers.

Building Your Online Professional Presence

WCUCOM also encourages students to develop and maintain a professional LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn can complement your CV by providing an online professional presence and opportunities to build your network. Use a professional-quality photograph, ensure that all information is accurate and polished, and keep your profile current.

Remember that residency programs, research mentors, and future employers may review your professional online presence. Your CV and LinkedIn profile should consistently represent you as a thoughtful and professional future physician.

Name and Contact Information

• Use your full, legal name at the top, with any nickname in quotation marks.

• List a phone number that you actually use.  As an option, a free google voice number may be created that goes to your phone, ensuring that a private cell number does not become public.

• Use a permanent email address, such as a Gmail.  In addition, a WCU email may be included, but know that will disappear when you graduate.

• Use an actual mailing address if you list an address.  People do still mail things sometimes, though not very often.  The address is optional and many leave it off for privacy reasons.  At a minimum, put your current city/state for inquiries related to a geographic search. 

• If listing a LinkedIn or personal website, include this with the contact information.  Ensure that the LinkedIn profile is up to date!

Education (beyond high school)

• List degrees and certifications in reverse alphabetical order with start and end dates (month/year). 

• An OMS 2028 student could list their WCU degree in the following manner:

August 2024 – Present

William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine

Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, anticipated May 2028

• Remember the degree name is Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine.  The same with the full name of the school, which is William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine.  No variants of these names are acceptable.  

• Only include recognitions that apply to the degree itself, such as Latin designations.  Do not include "Dean's List" or other recognitions that do not apply to the degree itself.  There is a separate awards category in the CV.  Do not duplicate entries.

Awards, Honors, and Recognitions

• Only include major premedical awards.

• Include all awards, honors, and recognitions received during medical school.  Do not use acronyms or abbreviations.

Research Experience

• Include concise, bulleted descriptions of research experiences that are sufficiently detailed so that the reader may understand what you did.  Use action verbs and highlight achievements rather than simply duties.  Include start and end dates (month/year).

• Do not include presentations or publications in this section - those have their own section.

• Do include the name, professional title, department, and institution of your research mentor.

Publications

• • Use a standard citation format, like the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine or JAMA, including the DOI.  Do not just use a URL in place of a citation.  If a manuscript has been submitted to a journal and is currently under review, include the citation and state "under review" or "submitted."  If it has been accepted, but not yet published, state "accepted for publication."  An example citation is below, with the student's name bolded:

Chang, R., Nelson, A. J., LeTran, V., Vu, B., Burkemper, B., Chu, Z., Fard, A., Kashani, A. H., Xu, B. Y., Wang, R. K., Varma, R., & Richter, G. M. (2019). Systemic Determinants of Peripapillary Vessel Density in Healthy African Americans: The African American Eye Disease Study. American Journal of Ophthalmology, 207, 240–247. doi:10.1016/j.ajo.2019.06.014 

• • If there are no publications yet, then do not include this category at all.  If the student has multiple publications, it is recommended to keep them in a free bibliographic database, such as Mendeley or Zotero.  If willing to spend a bit of money, Endnote can be purchased and used to keep both publications and presentations in one place.  The web version of Endnote may be free.

Conference Presentations

• Do not mix conference presentations with other types of presentations.  Have a section entitled Conference Presentations, with a full listing of all authors, title, conference name, date (year or month/year),and place (city/state) in a standard citation format, such as APA.  If the presentation or its abstract is available online, include the DOI or URL in a hyperlinked format so it is readily accessible by a viewer.  To make the PDF of a poster available to viewers, they can be posted on a personal page at researchgate.net and linked back to a CV.

• If a student has a lot of presentations, they may be subdivided into poster and oral presentations.

• It is an option to have a second section for 'Other Presentations,' where public presentations, like path parties, rotation presentations, etc., may be listed.  Presentations you give as a required part of a class should not be listed.

Professional/Work Experience

• Significant experiences, either paid or unpaid, prior to medical school should be included in this section if they are pertinent to medicine in some manner.

• The most common medical experiences in this category are typically medical scribe, EMT, and medical assistant.  Shadowing and services, such as orderlies, are not to be included.

• Paid research positions should be included in the research category and not duplicated here. 

• Significant nonmedical employment or professional experiences can be listed here if they are not already listed elsewhere.  Do consider what they portray before listing them.

Leadership

• • From premedical times, keep only high levels of leadership, e.g. captain of college track team or manager of a business.  Do not duplicate other categories, however, such as work experience.

  • Leadership during medical school could be positions such as an officer in a student club, student government, student liaison to medical societies, course representative, etc.

Teaching Experience

• • Formal teaching experience prior to medical school can be retained here, e.g. high school biology teacher or teaching assistant in a college laboratory course.

  • Teaching during medical school may include such things as peer-tutoring, workshop instructor, research assistant, etc.  Informal tutoring or assisting other students should not be listed.

Community Service

• • Community service prior to medical school is not normally retained on a medical student CV, unless it is exceptional in some way.

  • List significant activities during medical school, such as medical mission trips, health fairs, health screening in workplaces, service at food banks, high school sports physicals, etc.

Professional Associations

• • List memberships in medical or health-related organizations/societies.  Spell out the names, i.e. no acronyms, and include the date joined.

  • Include student clubs/interest groups in this category but clearly distinguish them from the professional societies.

Languages

• • If reasonably fluent in any language besides English, this is a positive thing that should be noted on your CV.  Do not list English.

  • If a language is listed, it is important to indicate both written and spoken proficiency/fluency.  If it is a native language, state that. 

  • It is also possible to include programming languages in this section, if proficient in them.

Certifications

• • It is strongly encouraged to list all certifications and other evidence of advanced training, including any prior to medical school, like EMT.

  • CITI courses are not technically 'certifications,' however, they are course completions and lots of outside parties, including residencies, do want to know about them. 

  • Below are examples of things that may go into this category.  Remember to add the expiration dates to them when listed.

    • • Basic Life Support 

      • Advanced Cardiac Life Support 

      • Pediatric Advanced Life Support 

      • Basics of Point of Care Ultrasound

      • CITI Responsible Conduct of Research

      • CITI HIPPA Information Privacy 

      • CITI Human Subjects, Biomedical/Clinical Research

Hobbies & Personal Interests

• • It's best to go into a bit of detail and avoid using one-word descriptions.  Instead of simply stating 'running,' it would be better to say, 'participate in 5K fun runs and marathons.'

  • Include hobbies and interests that demonstrate qualities such as leadership, teamwork, or creativity.  This is a conversation starter for potential interviewers.

Professional Development (advanced students)

• To list conferences attended but that one did not give a presentation at or have any other position of responsibility, it would be acceptable to list them in this separate section called 'Professional Development.'  It would need to be clearly labeled that the conferences were "conferences attended."  This professional development category will become increasingly more important as one's career advances, but it does serve as a good catch-all category in a CV for things that don't neatly fit into the other categories or that weren't a part of academic curriculum. 

• In addition to conferences, this section could include workshops, webinars, and such that showcase a commitment to staying current in a field of interested.  Preclinical students would not normally have a professional development section.

Additional Skills

• If one has additional skills that are valuable in a medical/clinical setting, a section may absolutely be created to highlight them.  If proficient in a particular EMR system or cutting-edge medical software, include that. 

• Do not include routine, expected clinical skills or equipment use, but if there is experience using unusual instrumentation, robotics, etc., then it is fine to list that here.  These kinds of things may set one apart from other students.

Advocacy

• This is normally focused on work done in the area of health policy, such as lobbying legislators, providing information for legislative staff, working with city administrators to develop health-related policies, voting delegate for state medical societies, etc.

DO NOT INCLUDE IN YOUR CV: irrelevant work experience, professional references, your photo, fancy graphics, purpose statement, listing of job skills or equipment used (there are exceptions, see below), test scores, social security number, birthdate, other highly personal information