An Unorthodox Approach to the Fellowship Process: Part 2 – The Invisible Summer Work

Author: Ravi Parekh

Views are my own and do not reflect my employer.

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The single biggest mistake I see fellowship candidates make is treating the summer before P4 year as downtime.

It is not.

May through August is the most important stretch of the entire recruitment cycle. 

If you want a real competitive advantage, your summer needs to be defined by relentless, proactive refinement. 

Here is how to maximize the "invisible" work during these few months:

The CV and LOI: Drafted, Revised, and Pulverized I started refining my CV in May. Not once, not twice. Repeatedly. Every few weeks I revisited it with fresh eyes, tightened the language, and cut out any fluff that didn’t serve the narrative. The CV is not just a list of things you did. Your CV has to tell a story and work entirely on its own before anyone ever speaks to you. It has to work on its own before anyone speaks to you.

The Letters of Intent (LOIs) took even more work. A generic LOI that could be submitted to any program is immediately obvious to a program director reading a hundred of them. I kept pushing my drafts all summer until each letter sounded like a version of me talking directly to that specific program.

Ruthless Networking Discipline One thing I was disciplined about during this stretch was how I reached out to current fellows. I only contacted them when I had specific questions that I genuinely could not find answers to anywhere else.

Do not reach out just to "introduce yourself" or say you are interested. Fellows are managing demanding workloads; their time is not yours to waste. If you hop on a 30-minute call and have nothing real to ask, it reflects poorly on you. Do your homework first.

The Corporate Advantage (If You Have It) If you’re interning at a pharmaceutical company during the summer, use that runway. It puts you face-to-face with fellows and program directors in actual working settings. My internship gave me access to an environment that most applicants do not get until recruitment season. Instead of just passive conversations, I treated every interaction as an opportunity to understand how industry teams function from the inside, not just what the brochure says. That context was invaluable.

The "One-Minute Speech" Routine This sounds small, but it isn’t. Your one-minute pitch is the version of yourself you deliver at a crowded reception, in the elevator after a dinner, or at the start of a formal interview. I practiced mine constantly with classmates, trading feedback and aggressively cutting the fluff. By September, it wasn't something I had to think about anymore; it just came out naturally.