Starting Your Journey : What You'll Need To Bring
Your match season officially begins on Sept 1st, when programs begin accepting applications for the residency positions that commence in June of the following year. By this date, you would ideally** like to have the USMLE Step 1, Step2CK & Step 2CS completed with scores reported. The successful completion of all three of these exams earns you an, ‘ECFMG Certification’ that qualifies you to enter an ACGME -accredited US Residency Training Program. (Click here for a more detailed explanation of each Step)
If you do not have all three exams completed, you can still enter the application process with a reported Step 1 score and a pending Step 2 CS score (taken in August at the very latest, as it takes 3 months to report that score). The missing score is usually the Step 2CK and the advice for what someone should do in that situation AFTER Sept 1st differs from case to case. (post in comments below if you think you'll be in situation and we can resume the discussion there)
The Electronic Residency Application Service, or ERAS, will be the convenient method you'll use to get your scores, plus other elements of your application such as Letters of Recommendation, Personal Statement, transcripts, and MSPE to programs across the country. (we'll go into further detail in an upcoming article after ERAS 2010 is released on July 1st).
How You Will Be Judged & Sorted
During the months of September & October, as you and other candidates submit applications to programs across the country, all of the residency training programs that receive those applications begin the difficult task of deciding who they want to offer interviews to. They have to take hundreds (in some cases thousands) of applications and decide which ones would be the best fit for their program. To get a better sense of how daunting that scenario is, imagine if you were put into a room with 1000 random men/women and then had less than 2-months to decide which ones you’d consider marrying. Now add to that 200 competitors vying for the same pool of potential partners. Assuming that you’re not shallow & superficial, how would you make the decision?
Residency programs do this every year and have it down to a science. In the months leading up to September, before any application is ever received, program directors/residency committees determine their agenda for the upcoming Match Season. They’ll consider several factors, including how they faired in the previous year’s Match, how to better balance their demographic to match their patient population, and how the current 1st year class of residents performed in their program over the past year. The discussion results in their strategy for the upcoming Match Season. This includes, but is not limited to the following filters:
~ Minimum accepted score for each Step
~ # of attempts per exam
~ Visa Status
~ Graduation Year (or years since graduation)

Understanding The First Filter : Scores
The first part of the strategy is the most effective in terms funneling the mountain of applicants down to a more manageable number. It’s also likely the cause of much of your stress right now. The program will eliminate applications that fall below what they have pre-determined to be their minimum accepted USMLE Score. Depending on the specialty, prestige and type of program (community vs university), that cutoff score for an IMG will likely fall somewhere in the low 80s and go up as high as the upper 90s.
Why are these scores so highly regarded by programs? To understand the answer to this question, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the programs and consider the demographic the applicants that participate in each year's match. In addition to the students from US Medical schools, the pool of consists of candidates from around the world. How do would you measure each candidate fairly, when medical schools outside the United States vary widely with regards to educational standards, curriculum, and evaluation method? Answer : you put everyone on the same playing field - both IMG's and US grads - and make them all take the most challenging medical licensing exam on the planet.
The USMLE is used as a standard of measure because it is reliable & verifiable. Unlike a letter of recommendation, clinical experience, or personal statement, which can all be skewed to give the candidate an advantage, the USMLE plays no favorites and year after year is a consistent in its measure of how well a candidate has mastered the knowledge required to practice medicine in the United States.
Got Scores? Welcome to the next round...
Making the cutoff score doesn’t guarantee you an interview. What it does ensure is that a program will let you in the door for further consideration. At that point they’ll look at all of the other components that make up your ERAS application: US Clinical Experience, Published Research Experience, med school transcripts, letters of recommendation, and personal statement, to name a few. For those unfortunate applicants with USMLE results that didn’t meet the program’s requirement, it won’t matter how impressive all these other components are, because they’ll likely never be seen.
Now let’s say you’ve made first filter with your strong USMLE scores. Congratulations, you’re not done yet. Depending on the program, the order of importance for each component will be different. A university based program, for example, may value research experience and put those candidates that have it above otherwise equally qualified candidates. Community based programs may prefer candidates with US Clinical Experience in part because of the volume of patients that they tend to service. Another filter that is used relies on whether or not the program is willing to sponsor an IMG requiring an H1-B working visa.
Whatever the case may be for each hospital, it is important for you to consider the criteria of the hospitals you’ll be applying to and make sure that you at least have a reasonable chance to be considered by that program. The first step is to accept the fact that you cannot change where you graduated, when you graduated, and your Visa status (some may disagree with that last one). Of the things you can control, the USMLE will serve as the primary factor determining how active (or inactive) you will be during the months of November, December & January, otherwise known as, ‘The Interview Period’ . . .
Stay tuned for the upcoming article : “November, December, January – The IMG Advantage”

and step 2 cs but I still haven't take the step 2 CK, I would like to know my chances of getting into the 2010 match... when would be the deadline to get my token? I am veeeeeery confused about the processss... any help would be very appreciated.
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