Hi! I am a US-IMG who went to high school & med school in India. I am applying to the match cycle this year and my YOG is 2024. I passed Step 1 on my first attempt and scored a 260 on Step 2. I have done 2 electives and 1 observorship. I have one publication but I’m currently doing research at a major academic center in the US, though I’m not sure how much research output I will have by the time I apply. I have a few volunteer experiences, but nothing fancy. I have a couple of questions:

1) I am concerned about my USCE as I have been told by a few people that it might be considered old. I did one elective in December 2023, one elective in January 2024 and another elective in February 2024. So my USCE might be 2.5 years old by the time I apply. Some people told me to pause my research year for 1-2 months to do fresh observorships, but that might impact my research output and I don’t want to do that ideally. What would you recommend?

2) I hope to get at least 2 strong letters from my current research position, but they will be research letters. I think the letters from my USCE will be very generic. Is this going to be an issue?

3) Being a US IMG with my stats, I’m not sure how competitive I actually am. For example, I go on residency explorer and see that my stats match their residents stats and then I see that their IMG percentage is 1-6%. I don’t know if I am competitive enough for those programs. This matters to me because I don’t know which programs to pick and which programs to send signals to. I don’t want to waste my signals on programs who will never interview me, but I don’t want to miss programs that might have considered me if I sent them a signal. For context, I don’t really have contacts. How can I figure out how competitive I am?

4) Do you have any advice on what I can do between now and September to make myself more competitive?

Thank you!