Curriculum Vitae updates

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frosted2

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I am in the process of updating my CV but had the question of when to start removing old stuff from it. I would think that my time volunteering as a cheerleading coach during undergrad will likely have no bearing on my residency application, but I wanted to get some feedback on when (time wise) we should begin removing older experiences.

What about older research experience or older employment that involved significant healthcare experience (10+ years) that might have bearing on a residency application?

MS2 for reference.

Thanks!

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Generally you want to keep everything on a CV. There’s no value in deleting anything. And having coaching and leadership experiences going back to undergrad shows a pattern. If you look at prominent faculty CVs you’ll see them listing things from way back when.

I have definitely reorganized it though, especially as I’ve progressed through school and training. So maybe structure it so that things more relevant to what you’re doing are more featured, but keep everything so there’s a nice overall size impact.
 
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I've started deleting a couple really irrelevant things (like, college club positions that were mostly there to pad out my resume before I had real employment), but definitely still keep older stuff to show your career trajectory on your CV. Research is forever. For things that I still wanted to have listed somewhere but aren't super important these days, I just made an "other" section at the end so they're there if someone wants to ask about them, but don't distract from my more relevant experiences (research, clinical work, etc)
 
For residency, I'm going to agree that you should start pruning. Faculty CV's definitely don't list volunteer work from college. And the longer your CV is, the less I pay attention to each item. So I would ask yourself whether the experience is critical to your "story". If not, remove it.

All pubs stay, forever. Jobs stay longer than vol activities, but also should get pruned out over time. All education stays forever. "Research experiences" is complicated since on academic faculty CV, it's usually just pubs and then current projects.
 
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For residency, I'm going to agree that you should start pruning. Faculty CV's definitely don't list volunteer work from college. And the longer your CV is, the less I pay attention to each item. So I would ask yourself whether the experience is critical to your "story". If not, remove it.

All pubs stay, forever. Jobs stay longer than vol activities, but also should get pruned out over time. All education stays forever. "Research experiences" is complicated since on academic faculty CV, it's usually just pubs and then current projects.
Do abstracts published in journals stay forever?
 
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Do abstracts published in journals stay forever?
I would say it depends. As someone else mentioned, faculty often have multiple versions, with one being comprehensive and others being pruned and more focused.

That said, as a student, I would definitely keep the abstracts unless you've got a crap ton of pubs
 
I would say it depends. As someone else mentioned, faculty often have multiple versions, with one being comprehensive and others being pruned and more focused.

That said, as a student, I would definitely keep the abstracts unless you've got a crap ton of pubs
Oh as a student, listing everything regardless of the pub count is the best move. Research experiences are so broad that not including abstracts and school posters is unnecessarily self-handicapping for ERAS. By permanent, i meant it as such and without ever having to remove them from CV regardless of career stage. I ask because there are abstracts published in world's best journals that to me seems unwise to ever remove them, but I suppose some pruning of less significant research entries can help
 
abstracts published in world's best journals that to me seems unwise to ever remove them
later stage researchers can list "selected" pubs/presentations, so keep the high impact ones and dump the small med school poster presentations

that said, an abstract or a poster presentation is rarely "high impact" or "in the world's best journal" - if it's that good, you'll probably end up with a full publication out of it eventually.
 
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later stage researchers can list "selected" pubs/presentations, so keep the high impact ones and dump the small med school poster presentations

that said, an abstract or a poster presentation is rarely "high impact" or "in the world's best journal" - if it's that good, you'll probably end up with a full publication out of it eventually.
I meant as a supplement issue in the leading journals. And yes these things are real and usually lead to papers in solid journals.
 
I meant as a supplement issue in the leading journals. And yes these things are real and usually lead to papers in solid journals.
I know they're real, but at that point you can just keep the full length paper on your resume. Unless the abstract is for a podium talk, those tend to stay on a resume much longer than a poster session or abstract alone

obviously most med students should list all the posters they can get, but it is really not uncommon for career researchers to stop caring about listing posters and smaller things.
 
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There's no one answer for this. You should definitely keep long-term, formative, substantial experiences on there. So for instance, if you were a D1 college athlete, that would be relevant and a substantial experience. Your 10 hours spent volunteering at a soup kitchen during freshman year of college could likely come off. The reason I mention this is because when it's time to apply to residency, you really don't want to be listing all of the random things you did in undergrad. You can list substantial experiences but the emphasis is on med school stuff and more recent stuff. So keeping an up to date CV makes that easier when the time comes.
 
Do abstracts published in journals stay forever?
I remove abstracts once I have a manuscript accepted. But at the OP’s stage, I would leave all research activities.

I do think almost all college volunteering activities can be removed
 
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I remove abstracts once I have a manuscript accepted. But at the OP’s stage, I would leave all research activities.

I do think almost all college volunteering activities can be removed
As a related note, at the ERAS applying stage, things like all research activities (papers, abstracts), med school ECs (+/- leadership?), college/gap year work experiences and AOA/GHHS status and maybe other awards are to be listed? I'm not sure if i'm missing something
 
As a related note, at the ERAS applying stage, things like all research activities (papers, abstracts), med school ECs (+/- leadership?), college/gap year work experiences and AOA/GHHS status and maybe other awards are to be listed? I'm not sure if i'm missing something
Sounds about right. I'm sure there's something else but that's most of it.
 
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