By Dr Claudia Liang
Dr Liang is a South London Ophthalmology trainee, and previous stinterview subscriber and community member. She now has joined us a tutor on the practice workshops. In this blog post, Claudia shares some simple tips for success especially around the formatting and content of the portfolio.
It is now the time of year when the ophthalmology recruitment process has kicked in, and it is non-stop from here… MSRA, portfolio, interview, all back-to-back. To say the least, it is a stressful time as you juggle multiple commitments.
Considering the weighting of your final application score (50% comes from portfolio), organising a comprehensive and well-structured evidence folder is crucial to success.
Here we provide you with 4 tips to lay out a winning portfolio
Tip 1 – The basics: keep the formatting consistent
There are as many budding ophthalmologists as there are personalities, and we all will end up with an evidence folder that is an expression of our creative self.
Many of us are highly visual individuals (let us not forget the examiners too), so hopefully we all know how to approach the basic tenets of presenting a professional folder that highlights our achievements. Simple things like keeping the formatting, the font and the styles consistent will make a big difference. 3 points (which is a LOT) are given to layout, organisation and quality.
Tip 2 – Content tables: follow the evidence folder
https://www.severndeanery.nhs.uk/recruitment/vacancies/show/oph-st1-25/evidence-folder-lib
Nothing exciting, just follow the order they ask for and it will make the examiners’ lives easier when they grade your portfolio. They will love you for it.
Tip 3 – Spell it out for them: be bold
You should be reading and re-reading the evidence folder until you can recite the criteria front-to-back.
Read the small print to make sure you don’t miss statements about what they want to hear, what they don’t care about (take it out) and what counts (which is what ultimately matters).
Keep the evidence folder criteria next to you as you write the content pages, any introductory sentences for pieces of evidence, or as you draft letters for consultants to sign. Make sure you gather your evidence in time, it’s a hard deadline. No evidence, no points.
In addition, make sure you either bold or highlight what you want them to look at/read.
Tip 4 – Keep calm and be concise
They have literally spelled it out on the website “follow the list of contents as precisely as possible as marks may be deducted for including unnecessary information”. The last thing an examiner wants to do is go through a stack of portfolios with lots of irrelevant information and non-intuitive organisation that makes it hard to grade. Get together with friends, compare portfolios and grade yourself on a regular basis. We regularly do this on the ST Interview peer WhatsApp group and are happy to look over yours or help decide if something should be included!
Since it is now mostly online, the nature of the organisation has changed. At the contents page for each subsection, I would put the page number according to the final PDF file for easy navigation.
Remember to check out our portfolio talk recording from the 5th October with real life examples of what makes a portfolio great (recording available to STinterview subscribers). This is particularly useful for those gathering last minute points and future applicants.
Best of luck! See you at the interview workshops.
Claudia