Multiple Small Projects, No Big Story: Weaving Them Into One Cohesive Narrative

You can match with “scrappy” research; you just cannot present it like a mess.

If you’re staring at ERAS wondering how to turn five poster abstracts, two half-finished QI projects, and a random summer lab gig into something that looks intentional—this is for you.

You do not need:

• A first-author NEJM paper.
• A four-year longitudinal project.
• A single “grand theme” that magically explains your life.

You do need:

• A frame.
• A through-line.
• Discipline about what not to say.

Let me walk you through exactly how to do that.

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Step 1: Stop Apologizing For Your Research Profile

Programs don’t reject people for “only” having small projects. They reject people who look disorganized, passive, or like they just checked boxes.

You’re probably telling yourself one of these stories:

• “My research is all over the place—nothing connects.”
• “I hopped around because opportunities fell through.”
• “I just said yes to whatever came up; it wasn’t strategic.”

Fine. That may be true. But it’s not your application story.

Your job is not to report your chaos. Your job is to impose order on it.

Here’s the basic mindset shift:

• Bad narrative: “I did a bunch of random things.”
• Good narrative: “I systematically explored different problems, settings, and methods, and that shaped how I practice and what I want next.”

We’re going to retrofit a structure onto your history. That isn’t lying. It’s what every adult does when they tell a professional story about their life.

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Step 2: Name Your Core Thread (Even If It Was Accidental)

You need one unifying idea that can hold all your projects. It does not have to be a super-specific disease or niche. In fact, broad is safer.

Here are threads that work extremely well with scattered projects:

• Patient safety and systems problems
• Outcomes that actually matter to patients or families
• Access to care / health equity / disparities
• Communication and decision-making
• Efficiency and workflow in clinical care
• Teaching and medical education
• Technology and care delivery (EMR, telehealth, decision support)

If you truly have projects across three specialties, you’ll almost always find that they share one of these:

Example 1:

• Peds asthma readmission QI
• ED time-to-antibiotics workflow project
• Surgery postop follow-up scheduling audit

Theme: “How system design affects preventable complications and re-hospitalizations.”

Example 2:

• MedEd: creating a practice questions bank
• A simulation-based code training study
• Evaluating a feedback tool for sub-I students

Theme: “How we train people, measure learning, and translate education into better care.”

You pick the lens. Then you run everything through it.

If you truly cannot see any shared angle, use this hierarchy and pick the smallest level that fits multiple projects:

Level	Example Theme	Works Across
1. System	“How care delivery models shape outcomes”	Multiple specialties
2. Population	“Care for older adults / pediatrics / underserved”	Different diseases
3. Method	“QI projects using PDSA cycles”	Different settings
4. Content	“Atrial fibrillation”	Very specific

If content (level 4) doesn’t link your projects, use system, population, or method. That’s how you turn “random stuff” into “deliberate exploration.”

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Step 3: Convert Each Project Into a Role in the Story

You’re not listing activities. You’re assigning each project a function in your narrative.

There are four classic “roles” your projects can play:

1. The Starter: How you first got curious about something.
2. The Explorer: When you tried a different angle or context on the same underlying problem.
3. The Skills Builder: The project that gave you a concrete skill (data analysis, survey design, QI methodology, etc.).
4. The Closer (or Work in Progress): How you’re currently applying what you learned or where you want to go next in residency.

Let’s do a real-style example.

Say your raw list looks like this:

• Chart review on DKA admissions in IM wards (2nd year)
• Poster on patient portal usage in a community clinic
• Summer research on telehealth follow-up after heart failure admissions
• QI project on discharge instructions readability

As-is, that just screams “miscellaneous.” Now give each a role:

• Starter: “I first got curious about preventable readmissions while doing a chart review of DKA admissions…”
• Explorer: “I then looked at how patients actually engage with outpatient tools—like the portal—in a community clinic…”
• Skills Builder: “A summer in heart failure telehealth follow-up taught me basic data extraction, building dashboards, and working with IT…”
• Closer: “Most recently, I’ve been focused less on technology itself and more on how patients receive discharge information—are we even speaking their language?”

Now your “random” projects form a progression: same underlying obsession, different angles.

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Step 4: Build the Spine: One Paragraph That Ties It All Together

Before you touch ERAS or your personal statement, write a single paragraph that answers:

• What’s the recurring problem I keep coming back to?
• What did each cluster of projects teach me?
• How does that affect what I want to do in residency?

Example for someone applying to IM with scattered QI and clinical research:

Across medical school my research looks broad at first glance—DKA admissions, telehealth for heart failure, portal usage, and discharge instructions—but they all came from the same frustration: we routinely discharge patients into confusion. I started with a simple chart review just trying to understand which DKA admissions were potentially preventable. That pushed me toward projects that looked at where communication and follow-up break down—both in a community clinic and in a tertiary care heart failure program. I picked up basic QI methods and realized that the fixes are rarely about a single note or order; they’re about how the system teaches and supports clinicians. That perspective is exactly what I want to bring into internal medicine residency: not just “treat and discharge,” but “design follow-up that actually works.”

That paragraph is your spine. You’ll adapt it for:

• Personal statement (expanded and more personal)
• ERAS “Experience” descriptions (condensed, project-specific)
• Interviews (“Tell me about your research,” “Walk me through your projects”)

If what you’re about to write doesn’t fit that spine, either:

• Rephrase it, or
• Leave it out.

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Step 5: Rewrite Your ERAS Entries Like a Cohesive Set, Not a Junk Drawer

The way you write the descriptions matters as much as the number of entries.

What most people do:

• “Collected data, entered data in Excel, helped with IRB, ran statistics using SPSS.”
  All task, zero insight. And each entry reads like a completely separate life.

What you should do: three moves in each entry:

1. One line of context that connects to the bigger theme
2. One or two specific contributions (what you actually did)
3. One insight or skill that clearly carries over to residency

Example transformation:

Weak – random chart review:
“Retrospective chart review of 200 patients with DKA. Collected demographic and outcome data. Helped prepare abstract for regional conference.”

Stronger – as part of a through-line:
“Retrospective review of 200 adult DKA admissions to identify potentially preventable readmissions and common system failures. Independently designed data collection sheet, extracted EMR data, and worked with my mentor to refine our definition of ‘preventable.’ This was my first exposure to how small documentation and follow-up gaps can snowball into ICU-level illness.”

Then your patient portal project description starts with:

“Building on the same interest in why patients fall through the cracks after discharge, I joined a project examining patient portal activation and use in a community clinic…”

Now ERAS reads like chapters of a single story, not a drawer of unrelated receipts.

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Step 6: Structure Your Personal Statement Around a Problem, Not a Paper

If you try to “feature” every project in your personal statement, you’ll produce a bland, overstuffed resume in paragraph form. Programs hate that.

Instead, you do this:

1. Open with a clinical moment that sets up your core problem.
   Not research. A patient. A night on wards. An “I didn’t know what I didn’t know” moment.
2. Then show how research gave you a way to attack that problem, even in small ways.
   You mention projects, but only as illustrations.
3. End by tying what you’ve learned to how you want to train, and what kind of resident you’ll be.

Tiny template:

• Paragraph 1–2: A patient / situation that exposes a system or knowledge gap.
• Paragraph 3–4: “That’s why I kept gravitating toward projects that…” (insert spine paragraph, adapted).
• Paragraph 5: How this shapes what you’re seeking in residency (specific to the specialty).

Notice what’s missing: a detailed chronology of summer after M1 to M4 in order. You’re not logging hours, you’re arguing for a way you think.

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Step 7: When Your Projects Really Are All Over the Place

Sometimes the truth is rough. Example:

• Oncology bench work (PCR, mouse models)
• A random dermatology case report
• Admin help on a cardiology registry
• A one-off MedEd survey project

You cannot convincingly pretend that’s a clean thematic arc about, say, “cardiovascular outcomes.” Don’t force it. Use a different frame:

Frame 1: Methods/skills exploration
“I tried different types of research to figure out where I could be useful and what kind of problems I like working on most.”

Frame 2: Process exposure to multiple fields before choosing
“I used research as a way to get inside different specialties, learn how they think about evidence and quality, and ultimately figure out where I could see myself.”

Then you define a unifying growth arc, not a content arc:

• Started as pure bench → realized you care more about direct clinical implications
• Moved into clinical data → learned to ask better outcome questions
• Touched MedEd/QI → realized you enjoy fixing the way we train and practice

Programs don’t punish curiosity. They punish incoherence. If you can explain why it looks scattered and what you learned from that, you’re fine.

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Step 8: Own Small Roles Without Sounding Insignificant

Another anxiety: “I was just one of ten students. I mostly did data entry. Is that even worth mentioning?”

Yes. But you cannot leave it at “I entered data.”

You elevate small roles by doing two things:

1. Name a concrete responsibility.
   “I independently handled X subset,” “I was responsible for Y step no one else wanted but everyone relied on.”

2. Extract a thinking lesson.
   What did that mind-numbing spreadsheet actually teach you about data quality, definitions, real patients behind numbers, etc.?

Example:

“Contributed to a multicenter registry of atrial fibrillation patients. I was responsible for cross-checking medication reconciliation and discharge summaries for 150 patients, which gave me a front-row seat to how inconsistently we document anticoagulation plans across sites.”

Now your “small role” becomes a micro-apprenticeship in system failure. That’s valuable, and it fits beautifully into a narrative about safety/communication.

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Step 9: Answer Research Questions in Interviews Without Sounding Like a Robot

You will get the classic: “Tell me about your research.”

If you recite every project chronologically, you’ll bore them and undermine your own story.

Here’s a simple structure that works:

1. Start with the theme:
   “Most of my projects revolve around [theme]—for example, how we manage transitions of care for high-risk patients.”

2. Then pick two projects that illustrate different angles on that theme.
   One earlier, one later.
   “I first worked on…”
   “More recently I’ve been focused on…”

3. Finish with a forward-looking line:
   “…and going into residency, I’m especially interested in…”

This shows:

• You can synthesize, not just list.
• You know what matters clinically.
• You have some direction but you’re not weirdly rigid.

Later, if they ask, “Can you tell me more about X project?” then you zoom into the methods, your role, and what it changed.

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Step 10: Decide What to Leave Out (Brutally, If Needed)

Not every scribble belongs in your ERAS research section. A weak, half-baked project can dilute your story.

Skip or minimize:

• Projects where you did essentially nothing beyond a single meeting or two.
• Abandoned projects with zero data collected and no clear lesson.
• Extremely off-theme work you cannot logically connect without tortured mental gymnastics.

Use this decision filter:

• Does including this help clarify my thread, show real skill/effort, or demonstrate perseverance?
• Or is it there because I am trying to inflate my list?

If it’s the latter, cut it or demote it to a single brief line under “Other Research Experience” in your CV, not your centerpiece.

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A Visual Way to Check Your Story

If you’re a visual person, map it. Literally.

Mapping Multiple Small Research Projects Into One Narrative

Step	Description
Step 1	All Projects List
Step 2	Pick Unifying Theme
Step 3	Assign Each Project a Role
Step 4	Write Spine Paragraph
Step 5	Rewrite ERAS Entries
Step 6	Structure Personal Statement
Step 7	Prepare Interview Answer

If a project cannot be meaningfully placed into that flow, that’s your signal: either reframe it or let it go.

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One More Example: Surgery Applicant With Mixed Projects

You’ve got:

• Breast cancer outcomes database work
• OR turnover time QI
• Case report on a rare hernia
• Small MedEd project on teaching knot tying to M3s

Theme: “How surgical teams function and learn together to improve patient outcomes.”

Spine paragraph:

I came into medical school thinking surgery was all about the individual operator. Working on a breast cancer outcomes database quickly showed me how much of the result is determined long before and after the time in the OR—by tumor boards, follow-up, and system-level decisions. I started paying more attention to team processes, which led to a QI project on OR turnover times and a case report that highlighted how communication between services can make the difference in catching a rare diagnosis. I also had the chance to help with a small knot-tying curriculum for M3s, which was the first time I saw how much we can speed up a team by teaching better and more systematically. I’m drawn to surgery precisely because of that blend: high-stakes individual skill embedded in complex systems that we can constantly refine.

Notice how all four projects now sound like parts of a single growing obsession. That’s the goal.

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Two Quick Reality Checks

1. “But isn’t this rewriting history?”
   No. You’re not fabricating data or roles. You’re deciding what to emphasize. Every attending you admire does this when they explain their “career path” that, in reality, involved plenty of flailing.

2. “What if I truly only have one tiny project?”
   Then your narrative is simpler. The research section isn’t going to carry your application; that’s fine for many fields and programs. Use the same framing: what question drew you in, what you learned, and how it shapes how you think. One honest, well-framed project beats five padded ones.

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Final Takeaways

1. You don’t need one giant research story; you need one clear thread that you can connect your projects to, even if they started as random.
2. Every project entry should have a role in that story—starter, explorer, skills builder, or closer—not just a list of tasks.
3. Your personal statement, ERAS entries, and interview answers should all echo the same spine paragraph, making your “multiple small projects” look like deliberate, cumulative growth rather than chaos.