At the most basic level, when physician residency program directors view an application, they try to answer two questions: Who is this person, and how might they fit into my program?
One key feature of the residency application that gives insight into those questions is the “Experiences” section. That portion gives residency applicants the opportunity to show their values, the challenges they have taken on and the moments that have shaped their journey in medicine.
How can medical students approach the Experiences section so that each entry adds weight to their application? Three residency program directors offered insight on that question.
Depth tells a stronger story
On MyERAS—other platforms function similarly in the Experiences section—applicants can list 10 experiences and highlight up to three as "most meaningful.” In considering your most meaningful experiences, the ones that you dedicated time and energy to will stand out, one program director said.
“I like to see people who have a longitudinal involvement in one or two projects rather than seven different projects without evidence of a deep connection to any of them,” said Rini Ratan, MD, an ob-gyn residency program director in New York, during a panel discussion on the Match at the 2025 AMA Annual Meeting.
Successfully plan your path to residency, from researching programs and excelling at interviews to navigating Match Day, with the AMA Road to Residency Guide.
Follow your passions
When you highlight an experience that is meaningful to you, it is likely to resonate with others. You also will want to highlight these experiences in your personal statement, by the way.
The experiences you highlight “should be meaningful to you, not what you think will be meaningful to someone else,” said John Andrews, MD, the AMA’s vice president for graduate medical education innovations.
“You pick the experience based upon how great a contribution it’s made to shaping your motivations and the reasons that you’re doing what you’re doing,” said Dr. Andrews, who served as a GME faculty member, pediatric residency program director, and associate dean for graduate medical education prior to joining the AMA.
Non-clinical roles matter
The Association of American Medical Colleges’ Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS) gives applicants the chance to highlight experiences across a range of fields, including research, teaching, volunteer or service work, professional organizations, extracurricular activities, military service and paid employment in clinical and nonclinical roles.
Experiences in any of those arenas can pique a program director’s interest. During the panel discussion, one audience member who went through the Match process in 2024 shared that they included a high school job at Starbucks in their application, and it came up in almost every interview.
Dr. Ratan agreed that key experiences “don’t necessarily have to be in medicine. Those selected experiences should paint a picture of who you are and what has brought you to this point.”
Filler will be forgotten
If you don’t have 10 experiences that are meaningful to you, it’s OK to leave a couple of slots blank.
“The threshold should be: Are these meaningful things that I want to expand and talk about and that convey something important about me,” said Sanjay Desai, MD, the AMA’s chief academic officer and a former internal medicine program director. “I’ve seen a list of activities where it’s a half an hour a month. It’s not meaningful. And then it just dilutes the things that are meaningful.”
Each entry is interview fodder
Every experience you include in your application is fair game in a residency interview. If you can’t talk about it, maybe it doesn’t belong.
“Anything you write in your application is something you ought to expect to be asked about [in an interview],” Dr. Andrews said.
Dr. Andrews added that if you list an experience in which you weren’t a very active participant, you might not be able to speak about it much in an interview, and that might stand out for the wrong reason.
Context is key
In listing experiences, use simple language. Describe what the activity was, what you did and why it mattered. Don’t assume residency program officials will know your award titles or organizational acronyms.
“When you’re in school, it feels as if everybody understands what I’m talking about,” Dr. Desai said. “But it’s not clear to others. Make sure it’s clear to a reader who doesn’t understand your school, because that will convey the importance of it in a different way.”
