ERAS

ERAS stands for Electronic Residency Application Service and the central application website fourth year medical students use in order to apply to residency programs. This page focuses on the ERAS application for surgery residencies. Timelines differ between certain specialties and application components and requirements often change a little year to year. Specific, up to date information can be obtained on the ERAS application website.

Application Timeline

• ERAS application opens in early June. Applicants can begin filling out the application and uploading documents at this time.
• ERAS application can be submitted in early September. 
• Residency programs can begin reviewing applications in late September. 
• The date first interview invites are extended vary by specialty. For general surgery, program directors have agreed to extend the first round of interview invitations in October. However, some programs may end up sending interview invites out prior to this date.
• MATCH day is the third Friday of March.

Application Components

• Email. When considering what email to attach your ERAS application to, be mindful that this email will be the primary means of communication between you and residency programs. Some applicants decide to make an email specific to their ERAS application so they are able to silence every notification on their phone except for emails to their ERAS email. This can be helpful especially if you are not able to access your phone easily when interview invitations go out. You can have your phone on your person and when you get a notification, you know it’s an interview invite and can excuse yourself from your current setting and respond and sign up for the interview promptly, securing your ideal interview date as soon as possible.
• Geographic preference. Applicants can elect to display a geographic preference they feel a close tie to, or indicate they have no geographic preference at all.
• Medical school awards
• Membership in honorary/professional societies
• Education history
• Postgraduate training
• Experiences/Experience type
  • Experiences
    • Format
      • As with every component of the application, there are a lot of different ways you can go about formatting your experiences section. Below, you will find how we have recommended applicants fill out this section in the past, but there are many good ways of tackling how to share this information.
      • Example:
        • Experience: Researcher
        • Dates: MM/YYYY – MM/YYYY
        • Location: City, State
        • Goal: formulate a research question, develop a method to obtain appropriate data, collected data in the lab, and shared findings at the annual conference
        • Duties (*** hours)
          • Studied the ***
          • Operated software and measurement tools to collect quantitative data
          • Collected qualitative data on ***
          • Presented research findings at ***
    • When selecting your top experiences to share, we encourage you to be genuine in your selection. Include experiences you are passionate about.
  • Experience type
    • Education/training
    • Military service
    • Professional organization
    • Other extracurricular activities/clubs
    • Research
    • Teaching/mentoring
    • Volunteer/service/advocacy
    • Work
• Hobbies. Hobbies used to be included as a part of the ERAS application to allow residency programs to see another side of applicants and what they enjoy pursuing outside of medicine. In the 2024 MATCH, hobbies were not included. While hobbies are included in the 2025 MATCH, we expect the hobbies section, just like ERAS as a whole, to fluctuate year to year. If there isn’t a hobbies-specific section to the ERAS application, we encourage you to use one of your Experiences as a hobby to showcase interests unique to you.
• Publications
• Hometowns
• Other awards/Accomplishments
• CV
• Letters of recommendation
  • Requirements
    • Minimum of 3 letters, usually
    • Maximum of 4 letters
    • Required program department/chair letter (for surgery, note: SLOE or other letters may be required for different specialties)
  • When to ask for LORs. This will vary depending on how soon you know what type of residency you will be applying to. We recommend asking attendings for LORs as soon as you know your specialty. While most letter writers will likely wait to complete your letter until a month (or less) until applications are due, some writers will actually complete your request earlier.
  • Who to ask for letters from. Some specialties, like surgery, require an LOR from a program/department chair from your school in addition to other letters to meet the minimum letter requirement. Other specialties (but not currently surgery) require things like a SLOE (Standardized Letter of Evaluation) as one of their required LORs. As you would likely assume, ask for letters from attendings in the same specialty you are wanting to pursue. If you’re thinking, “but I only had one surgery attending and four possible letters to submit – what do I do?!” – we have ideas for you! One option is to ask surgical specialty attendings, like Ob/Gyn, orthopedics, ENT, to write a LOR. In addition, you can ask attendings you meet on away rotations to write letters for you as well. Just be sure that you complete the aways early enough from the application deadline that you are able to give your letter writer an appropriate amount of time to write your letter – we recommend at least one month. 
  • Maximum of four. Surgery has a maximum number of four LORs for your ERAS application. Be sure to read program requirements carefully as some programs will only want three. In our experience, after looking at almost all surgical residencies, most programs have some version of, “we require a minimum of three letters” listed on their website.
  • Assign to each program. Odds are, you will have some staple letters that you assign to every program you apply to. These letters will come from your program chair/department and likely your core attending during third year rotations. It may be that you have a surplus of letters, perhaps six or seven, after completing away rotations. If this is the case, you will want to be mindful of assigning your best letters to the programs you are applying to. 
  • You can assign letters to each program, so perhaps you only use the letter from Dr. Luna for your application to Leo University’s residency program since that is where you met Dr. Luna. And then opt to use other letters for all other applications since you only interacted with Dr. Luna once and feel like her letter will not be as strong as other letters you have at your disposal as a result.
• Personal statement. Work on this months and months in advance. Go through rough drafts, step back for a few days, and revisit it over and over again. We encourage you to send it to trusted friends who have a knack for editing and can help you shape the statement into something you’ll be proud of. There are services available that will offer to help you write an artistically crafted, beautifully flowing personal statement for several hundred dollars and if you have the money and want to pursue that, it is up to you. But if you can save some money and still have something you are proud to submit, we encourage you to do so.
• USMLE/COMLEX scores
• MSPE characteristics

Application Questions

• Signaling programs. Surgery allows for five program signals and does not utilize a tiered system (e.g., gold, silver, bronze) to indicate preference within signals. Signaling is still new to ERAS applications and many programs are still figuring out what signals mean to them and if they mean anything at all. You can reach out to programs to see what their stance on signaling is, but in general, signal programs you are genuinely interested in. You can read more on what signals are supposed to mean and what programs are supposed to do with signaling information. Do not stress about signaling programs – pick them and move on.

Interviews

• Scheduling interviews and interview invites. Congratulations! You have an interview invitation. Now what? Schedule your interview as soon as possible. Residency programs use several different platforms to schedule and conduct interviews, including the ERAS website, Zoom, Thalamus, Webex, and Microsoft Teams. Make accounts as needed, but keep a master list of every interview you schedule on your phone so you can reference it quickly when you get additional invitations. Add interviews to Google calendar so you will be alerted ahead of the scheduled interview time and never miss an interview.
• Interview conflicts. While we hope you have no issues with scheduling interviews, it may happen that you have interview invites for the same day or time and there are no alternatives in sight. If this happens, it is likely that you already have an interview scheduled and you receive a new interview invite with the same date/time as an invite you have already accepted. There are several things you can do. One option is to keep your already scheduled interview and respond to the new invite asking for a different interview date since you are currently unavailable at the offered time but would like to interview with the program. This is the ideal scenario. However, option two would be to accept the new interview invitation and email the previously scheduled interview coordinator to ask for an alternative time, explaining that a scheduling issue has arrived. Ideally, option two would never happen, but if a program that you think would be a better fit for you is offering an interview invitation after you’ve already been scheduled for an interview at a program you are not excited to interview with, then option two may be the best thing for you. 
• Completing interviews
  • Prepare. Think of interview questions you will likely be asked (we’ve included some below) and have bullets listed for things you want to include in your response for each of them.
    • What are your top strengths?
    • What are your greatest weaknesses?
    • What are you looking for in a residency program?
    • Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
    • Tell me about a time when you had a conflict in the workplace and what you did to resolve it.
    • I saw *** listed on your CV. Tell me more about that.
    • Tell me more about your research project.
    • Why do you want to pursue surgery?
    • What is a patient encounter that has stuck with you? What did you learn from this encounter?
    • What is your walk-on song?
    • Tell me about a time when you failed at something.
    • What are some of your regrets?
    • Why should we pick you over another candidate?
    • What will you bring to the program as a resident?
    • What is your most important accomplishment?
    • What motivates you?
  • Practice. Just like with medical school interviews, you want to practice for interviews. Don’t just run through different interview questions in your head or on paper, but practice speaking out loud. You can do so in the car, in the shower, and around your house. 
  • Questions to ask the program. Of course, do not ask questions that you can figure out by looking at the program website. Do your work ahead of time to learn about the program as much as you can. After all, you applied to the program, so there must have been something you liked about the program that made you decide to apply. Below, you will find a few suggested questions that may help serve as a starting point for more questions.
    • What is the support for residents presenting at conferences and attending conferences?
    • Do your residents have interactions with fellows and medical students?
    • What changes will be coming to the program in the next 5 years?
    • Are many faculty involved in research?
    • How difficult is it to get involved in research during residency?
    • What percentage of residents end up going into fellowship?
    • What is resident life like outside of the program?
    • What sets this program apart from others?
    • How is mentorship handled at your residency? Is it a formal mentorship?
    • Tell me how your residency approaches autonomy.
    • Does the program provide housing for away rotations?
    • How does your program handle holiday scheduling?
    • What is your board pass rate? (note: common to find on website) 

Ranking Programs

• Do not gamify. During your interview, you asked questions that were important for you personally and the responses you got from each program will figure into how you rank them. Applicants usually decide on what is most important to them and rank programs from there. It may be geography, case number, away rotations, etc.

MATCH

• Sign up for the MATCH through NRMP, usually in June.
• Pay the registration fee. The standard fee is $70.

Resources

• ERAS: search for and apply to residency programs
• Residency Explorer (free): learn about individual residency programs; includes number of positions offered in the NRMP MATCH, number of applications the program received, and the percent of applicants that were interviewed
• FREIDA (free, with option to purchase subscription): search for residency programs accredited by the ACGME
• ERAS application website: details each section of the ERAS application
• NRMP

Email surgerystudentweb@gmail.com with questions regarding ERAS and residency applications.