Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination (COMLEX); depending on the requirements of the individual schools you choose, you may have to take both. The application process usually encompasses the fourth year of medical school, with interviews taking place between October and February.While each hospital has its own requirements, they're relatively uniform between hospitals. Typically, applicants are required to hold a degree from a U.S. or Canadian school accredited through the Liaison Committee on Graduate Medical Education (LCME) or the American Osteopathic Association (AOA). Applicants who attended medical school outside the U.S. or Canada need a certificate from the Educational Council on Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) [source: University of Wisconsin].
Graduates of medical schools outside the U.S. and Canada must be eligible to work in the U.S., either through citizenship, a visa or a resident alien permit. Hospitals outside the U.S. have their own criteria for applying for medical residency, which varies from country to country. Check with the individual hospital to determine if you're eligible.
Of course, there's a lot more to applying for a residency than just your degree and your USMLE score. We'll explain the rest in the next section.
Medical Residency Applications
Applications for medical residency in the U.S. are all handled through the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS), a program run by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The AAMC is a non-profit organization that represents most of the medical schools and teaching hospitals in the U.S. Canada [source: AAMC].
The ERAS system makes things quite a bit easier for medical residency applicants. You only have to submit required documents and scores once (to ERAS), then ERAS sends the relevant info to the hospitals you apply to. All of this is handled through the MyERAS application page.
Through ERAS, you'll submit your medical school transcript, your USMLE or COMLEX score, a personal statement, curriculum vitae, letters of recommendation, performance evaluations and other materials, as requested by the hospitals you apply to.
Once you've submitted all of your documents and selected the hospitals you wish to apply to, ERAS handles the rest. It sends copies of documents to the residency programs you've applied to. Residency staffs even use it to look at applicants and evaluate their applications [source: ERAS].
Once you've submitted your application, you'll move on to the interviews. Find out what to expect in the next section.
