Ten minutes on Tuesday

Dear Applicant,

You have had a week. Programs open your file in fourteen days, on September 23 at 9 a.m. ET, which is the moment the AAMC lets programs begin reviewing MyERAS applications and MSPEs. Until then nobody is reading anything.

So this week has exactly one hard task, and it takes ten minutes.

Note the day. It is a Tuesday, not a Monday, and it is noon Eastern, not midnight.

Registration for the 2027 Main Residency Match opens then. You need your AAMC ID, a payment method, and about ten minutes. That is the whole task.

Two things worth knowing before you sit down:

Standard registration runs until January 29, 2027 at 11:59 p.m. ET. After that the NRMP adds a $50 fee. There is no advantage to registering late and there is a fifty dollar disadvantage, so do it in September while it is a calendar item instead of in January while it is a problem.

Registering with the NRMP is not the same act as submitting through ERAS. They are two separate organizations running two separate systems, and doing one does not do the other. If that sentence surprised you, read ERAS and NRMP are two different systems before Tuesday. People lose whole cycles to this.

Submission opened September 2 at 9 a.m. ET. Programs see nothing until September 23. That gap is the only part of this process that is genuinely on your side, and it is shrinking.

If your program list and your signals are done, submit this week, calmly, once. Nothing about submitting on September 9 reaches a program earlier than submitting on September 22. What changes is how much of your remaining attention the task is eating.

If your list is not done, that is this week's real work, not the registration.

The 2027 MyERAS application redesigned and renamed the old Publications section. Two mechanics sit inside it that most people read past.

There is no limit on the number of entries you may include. And you may select up to three entries as Most Meaningful.

Put those two facts next to each other and the section tells you what it wants. Unlimited entries means the list itself is not a filter, so a long list is not an achievement. The three Most Meaningful slots are the section. They are the part a reviewer with a stack of applications is actually going to land on.

Which means the selection question is not "what are my three most impressive citations." It is "which three can I still talk about with real interest in February." Those are frequently not the same three. More on the rest of the cycle's changes in what actually changed in ERAS for 2027.

Paste your final program list into the first column of your tracker, before invites start arriving. Not because the list is precious, but because invites arrive at bad times and they need somewhere to land that is not your inbox.

Five columns is enough. Ours is here: the interview tracker.

And if you want every remaining date in one place through Match Day on March 19, that is Match 2027, every date that matters.

None pending. When we get something wrong it runs here, at the top, in plain language. How we check things is here.

That is the week. Ten minutes on Tuesday, and the rest of it spent on the list.

Alex Rowan Dear Applicant 🩺

P.S. If you know someone applying this cycle who still thinks ERAS registration and NRMP registration are the same thing, forward this to them before the fifteenth. That one costs people real money and occasionally a whole year.