How the ERAS CV Works
In the MyERAS portal, your CV is not a traditional uploaded document. Instead, the system automatically generates a standardized CV from the information you enter across multiple sections. Every program receives the same formatted document — you cannot customize the layout or design.
This is why starting early matters so much. Most applicants wait until August to fill in ERAS, then rush through it under deadline pressure and miss important entries. Starting now gives you time to reflect on your experiences, write thoughtful descriptions, and identify the stories that belong in your personal statement and that your letter writers should highlight.
A complete, well-organized ERAS CV helps in three ways simultaneously. It feeds your personal statement by surfacing experiences and stories you might have forgotten. It gives your letter writers a full picture of your accomplishments so their letters are specific and strong rather than generic. And it makes the actual ERAS submission in September much faster with far less stress.
1. Experiences Section
Experiences Section — Up to 10 Entries
You can list a maximum of 10 experiences. Choose quality over quantity. Focus on medical school and recent activities that best show who you are as a physician and future colleague. Older experiences from before medical school carry less weight unless they are genuinely exceptional or directly relevant.
For each experience, write your description in plain text using strong action verbs. Start with what you did, not where you were. "Led a team of four residents in a quality improvement project" is stronger than "Participated in QI project at X hospital."
Strong action verbs to use: Led, Coordinated, Developed, Designed, Implemented, Managed, Mentored, Presented, Published, Trained.
Most Meaningful Experiences
Select up to 3 of your 10 experiences as Most Meaningful. You receive an extra 300 characters for each to explain why it was meaningful and how it shaped you as a physician. Use these wisely. The Most Meaningful section is where personality and reflection come through — not just what you did, but what it meant and what changed in you because of it.
Your 10 entries should tell a cohesive story about your journey into your specialty. A program director reading your experiences should be able to see a clear thread — clinical curiosity, research commitment, community focus, or whatever is genuinely true about you. Random unrelated entries signal an unfocused application.
2. Scholarly Work Section
Scholarly Work — New Name for 2026 to 2027
For the 2026 to 2027 cycle, the former Publications section is now called Scholarly Work. The content is similar but the structure is more flexible.
Focus on quality, not quantity. Three strong peer-reviewed publications are more impressive than eight abstracts and posters. If you have limited scholarly work, be strategic about what you include and how you describe your contribution.
Scholarly Collections
A new feature for this cycle allows you to group related outputs into a single Scholarly Collection. For example, if one research project produced a poster presentation, a conference abstract, and a journal manuscript, you can group all three into one collection rather than listing them separately. This shows the full arc of your research project and demonstrates depth and maturity to program directors rather than padding your list with individual entries.
Consolidating related items is almost always better than listing them separately. A program director who sees one strong Scholarly Collection with a poster, abstract, and manuscript understands you completed a project from start to finish. Separate listings of the same items look like padding and experienced reviewers notice immediately.
3. Core CV Components Organized by MyERAS
Core Sections Generated Automatically
These sections are organized and formatted automatically by MyERAS based on information you enter in the portal.
- Education: Medical school, graduate, and undergraduate degrees in reverse chronological order. Include your graduation date and any honors.
- Postgraduate Training: Especially important for IMGs. Include any prior residency training, research fellowships, or non-ACGME training programs. This section explains your timeline and demonstrates US experience.
- Honors and Awards: Medical school awards, scholarships, honor society memberships such as Alpha Omega Alpha or Gold Humanism. Include the year and a brief description if the award is not self-explanatory.
- Hobbies and Interests: Keep this authentic and specific. "Playing guitar in a local band" is more memorable than "music." This section often serves as an icebreaker during interviews. Program directors remember specific hobbies when they are reviewing their rank list.
- Language Proficiency: A simplified yes/no format for fluency levels. If you are proficient in a language relevant to the patient population you want to serve, make sure it is listed here and mentioned in your personal statement.
4. Optional Impactful Experiences
Significant Hardships and Impactful Experiences
You have a 750-character space to describe any significant hardships — financial, family, educational, or personal — that shaped your path to medicine. This section is optional and should only be used if you have a genuine story of resilience that helps explain your journey.
Do not use this section to explain away a low score or a gap without a real story behind it. Program directors read thousands of these. Authentic hardship narratives that explain a non-linear path are respected. Manufactured adversity to explain mediocre performance is transparent and counterproductive.
If you have a real story here — financial hardship, a family crisis, a health challenge — this is the right place for it. Keep it factual, focused, and forward-looking. End with what you did, not with what happened to you.
How to Write Strong Experience Descriptions
Most applicants write ERAS experience entries like job descriptions — passive, generic, and forgettable. A program director reading "Volunteered at free clinic" learns nothing about you. Strong entries show progression, quantify impact, and demonstrate the qualities your specialty values.
Program directors spend 10 to 30 seconds scanning experiences on the first pass. Entries that start with passive language — participated, assisted, helped — get skipped. Entries that open with Led, Developed, Organized, or Initiated get read. Your first word signals whether this entry is worth reading.
The 4-Part Framework for Every Entry
Use this structure for every experience, keeping it to 3 to 5 sentences within 750 characters:
- What you did — start with a strong action verb, not your title or organization name
- How you grew or progressed — show advancement over time, not just attendance
- Quantifiable impact — numbers, scale, outcomes, patients served, students taught
- What you learned or contributed — specific skill gained or change produced
Before writing any entry, ask yourself: "What would not exist, or what would be different, if I had not been involved?" If the honest answer is "nothing" — this is a passive entry. If the answer is specific — that is your entry. Everything that follows should answer that question in 750 characters.
Before and After Examples
Example 1 — Free Clinic Volunteer
"Volunteered at a free low-income clinic."
"Progressed from assisting with patient intake to independently conducting focused histories and presenting cases during team huddles at a free clinic serving 200 uninsured patients monthly. Organized a weekly diabetes education group reaching 80 patients over six months, improving medication adherence tracking. Strengthened commitment to equitable care and developed high-volume outpatient workflow skills."
Example 2 — Research Experience
"Participated in a research project on hypertension."
"Contributed to a prospective study on hypertension management in an urban safety-net clinic. Recruited and consented 45 patients, collected and analyzed baseline data in REDCap, and presented preliminary findings at the departmental research symposium. Work identified barriers to medication adherence, leading to protocol changes now implemented clinic-wide."
Example 3 — Award
"Received Dean's Award."
"Dean's Excellence Award — 1 of 4 recipients selected from 180 graduating medical students based on academic performance, clinical evaluations, and demonstrated leadership in community service."
Power Verbs by Category
Start every entry with one of these instead of "participated," "assisted," or "helped":
Led, Organized, Developed, Coordinated, Implemented, Founded, Managed, Spearheaded, Initiated
Delivered, Provided, Performed, Facilitated, Counseled, Educated, Advocated, Diagnosed, Managed
Improved, Increased, Reduced, Enhanced, Achieved, Served X patients, Trained Y students, Resulted in
How to Write Awards Correctly
Awards are one of the most mishandled parts of the ERAS application. Most applicants simply list the name. This is a significant mistake with two consequences.
An award without context is assumed to be minor. But more importantly — an award that nobody can understand signals poor communication skills. A program director who cannot decode what your award means will think less of your application, not more. An unexplained award actively hurts you. Either add context or remove the entry.
Known awards that need no explanation:
- Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) — universally understood by US programs
- Gold Humanism Honor Society — universally understood
- AOA equivalent honors at your institution — clearly labeled as such
Every other award needs this formula:
[Award name] — [1 of X recipients] from [pool size], selected based on [criteria in one phrase]. [Level: school / regional / national / international].
This takes approximately 120 to 150 characters — well worth spending out of your 750 character budget.
Choosing the Right 10 Experiences
With only 10 slots, selection matters as much as writing. A weak entry does not just fail to help — it takes up space that could belong to a stronger experience.
A passive entry with no leadership, growth, impact, or skill acquisition takes up one of 10 limited slots without adding value. Program directors skip these entries. Consider replacing a weak passive entry with a stronger experience, or leaving the slot empty. An empty slot is less harmful than an entry that signals you do not know how to present yourself.
- Prioritize recent medical school experiences — aim for the majority of your 10 entries from this period
- Show continuity — long-term commitments are stronger than many brief one-time events
- Combine similar short activities under one umbrella entry — multiple screening events, multiple short USCE rotations, multiple conference presentations from one project
- Include no more than 1 to 2 pre-medical experiences unless they are truly exceptional
- Complement your personal statement — do not repeat the same stories. Your 10 entries should give program directors additional information, not restate what they already read
Make Sure Your Application Is Consistent
Your application should tell a coherent story. Not all 10 experiences need to be specialty-specific — that is unrealistic for most applicants. But at least 2 to 3 entries should demonstrate the core qualities your target specialty values.
Clinical reasoning, managing complexity, intellectual curiosity, chronic disease management, patient relationships
Technical aptitude, procedural exposure, decisiveness under pressure, stamina, teamwork in high-stakes settings
Communication, empathy, longitudinal patient relationships, comfort with ambiguity, understanding human behavior
Family communication, advocacy, community focus, comfort across age groups, cultural humility
Procedural interest, GI or hepatology research, patient outcomes focus, quality improvement in GI settings
Decisiveness, breadth of clinical exposure, performance under pressure, teamwork, systems thinking
Program directors are looking for evidence that you have the qualities, skills, and genuine interest that this specialty requires. A future surgeon showing procedural exposure from an anatomy teaching role — even though it is not surgical — still demonstrates technical aptitude and performance under observation. Use what you have and frame it toward what your specialty values.
ERAS Experience Categories and Fields
When you enter each experience in MyERAS, you must assign it to an Experience Type. You also have the option to select a Primary Focus Area and Key Characteristic. Do not leave these optional fields blank.
More than 90 percent of program directors report reviewing the Primary Focus Area and Key Characteristic fields according to the AAMC Program Director Survey. These fields take 30 seconds to fill in and give program directors an immediate visual summary of your strengths. Leaving them blank is a missed opportunity that most applicants take.
Experience Types (Required — choose one per entry)
- Education/Training — clinical training including clerkships, away rotations, subinternships, structured observerships
- Military Service
- Professional Organization — societies, associations at local, regional, national, or international levels
- Other Extracurricular Activity, Club, or Hobby — sports, music, theater, student government
- Research
- Teaching/Mentoring — paid teaching positions, teaching assistant, tutor
- Volunteer/Service/Advocacy — unpaid experiences
- Work — paid clinical, nonclinical, business, or entrepreneurial experiences
Primary Focus Areas (Optional but strongly recommended)
- Basic science
- Clinical/translational science
- Community involvement/outreach
- Customer service
- Health care administration
- Improving access to health care
- Medical education
- Music/athletics/art
- Promoting wellness
- Public health
- Quality improvement — patient safety, reducing infection rates, implementing protocols
- Social justice/advocacy
- Technology — engineering, software, biomedical devices, EHR
Key Characteristics (Optional but strongly recommended)
- Communication
- Critical thinking and problem solving
- Cultural humility and awareness
- Empathy and compassion
- Ethical responsibility
- Ingenuity and innovation
- Reliability and dependability
- Resilience and adaptability
- Self-reflection and improvement
- Teamwork and leadership
Most Meaningful Experiences — How to Use the Extra 300 Characters
Up to 3 of your 10 experiences can be designated as Most Meaningful. These receive an additional 300 characters for reflection. Program directors pay extra attention to these three entries. They signal what matters most to you.
The additional 300 characters are for reflection only — not repetition. Do not summarize what you already described. Use this space to explain why this experience mattered and how it shaped your values, growth, or commitment to your specialty.
"This experience crystallized my commitment to GI fellowship by showing me how early endoscopic intervention changes outcomes. Watching a patient avoid surgery because of timely diagnosis remains the clearest example of why I chose this specialty."
Good themes for the Most Meaningful section: a specific patient or mentor who changed your perspective, a moment of clinical clarity, a setback that revealed resilience, a discovery that redirected your career.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Writing CV-style job descriptions instead of reflective narratives with impact and growth
- Leaving the Primary Focus Area and Key Characteristic fields blank when over 90 percent of PDs review them
- Listing awards without explaining selectivity, pool size, criteria, or level
- Using bullet points — ERAS does not render them and they appear as symbols or blocks
- Overloading on pre-medical activities at the expense of recent medical school experiences
- Repeating content from your personal statement — the 10 entries should add new information
- Failing to combine similar short experiences — multiple brief USCE rotations or screening events waste slots
- Using the Most Meaningful extra 300 characters to repeat the description instead of reflecting on meaning
Pro Tips for a Strong ERAS CV
Plain Text Only
ERAS does not support bold, italics, bullet points, or any special formatting. Draft all your descriptions in Notepad or TextEdit first to strip out any formatting before pasting into MyERAS. What looks organized in Word may paste as a jumbled mess.
No "Curriculum Vitae" Header
The system already labels your document as a CV. Adding a header yourself creates a redundant and unprofessional-looking document. Start directly with your content.
Professional Photo
Optional but recommended. Dimensions: 2.5 by 3.5 inches, under 100 KB file size. Use a clean headshot with a neutral background, professional attire, and a natural expression. A photo makes your application more memorable when program directors are reviewing names and faces before ranking.
Start Now
Even if you are not submitting until September, filling out the Experiences and Scholarly Work sections now will help you reflect on your story. The process of writing 750-character descriptions forces you to think about what each experience meant — and that thinking directly feeds your personal statement.
Share With Letter Writers
When you request letters of recommendation, share your completed ERAS CV with your writers. A letter writer who can see your full accomplishments — including the experiences you are highlighting and why — will write a far more specific and compelling letter than one working from memory.
Connect to Your PS
Your ERAS CV and personal statement should reinforce each other, not repeat each other. The PS should tell the story behind your most significant experiences. The CV lists the facts. A program director who reads both should feel they understand you more completely, not that they read the same information twice.
750 characters is approximately 100 to 120 words. That is tight. Write your description, count the characters, then cut ruthlessly. Every word should earn its place. Filler phrases like "I had the opportunity to" or "This experience allowed me to" waste characters that could be used for specific details that actually distinguish you.
Official ERAS Worksheet
The best way to prepare for MyERAS is to see the real form before you log in. The AAMC publishes an official ERAS Residency Applicant Worksheet that shows you exactly what you will need to fill out. Going through it now means no surprises in September.
Official 2026 ERAS Residency Applicant Worksheet
Download the complete 26-page worksheet from the AAMC. This is the exact form you will fill out in MyERAS. Use it now to organize your experiences, scholarly activities, and other information before the portal opens.
Download ERAS Worksheet PDF (AAMC)Ready to optimize your ERAS experience entries?
The ERAS CV Optimizer transforms your rough descriptions into powerful, PD-ready entries using the exact framework program directors look for. Show what you learned, built, and achieved, not just where you showed up. Free during beta.
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