Months of steps prep and exam sitting, rotations, research, letters, and a personal statement you rewrote nine times. Then MyERAS shows you a small box asking about your hobbies, and you sit there with nothing.
Most people handle it one of two ways. They leave it blank, or they type “reading, traveling, music” and click away. Both are a waste. Look, this box isn’t going to win you an interview. But it’s one of the only spots in the entire application where a program gets to see a person instead of a score report.
You have 300 characters to work with. Below is what to put in them, what to keep out, and how IMGs especially can handle this without second-guessing themselves.
It lives inside the Experience part of MyERAS, but it stands on its own. It is not one of your 10 selected experiences, and it doesn’t eat up one of those slots. Just a single free-text field, capped at 300 characters.
Why does it exist at all? Because everything else in your application answers the question “what has this applicant done.” Nothing answers “what is this applicant like?”
Worth knowing if you’re reading older advice: hobbies used to be tucked inside the experience type menu. AAMC pulled it back out into its own section starting with the 2025 season, after program directors, faculty interviewers, and applicants all asked for it. It has stayed separate since.
Yes. Plenty of blog posts out there still describe hobbies as just another experience category. Those posts are out of date.
You have 300 characters to show the programs who you are outside medicine.
Applicants misread this all the time, so: characters, not words. Spaces count. Commas count. You’re looking at roughly two short sentences, maybe three if they’re tight.
Which rules out the shotgun approach:
Reading, traveling, cooking, watching movies, spending time with family, exercising, listening to music. That fills the box and says nothing. Two interests described properly will always beat eight listed vaguely.
Run each one through three quick checks.
“Reading” tells a reader nothing. “Historical fiction, especially books about South Asian history” gives them something to picture, and something to ask about.
Don’t add an activity because you think it’ll land well. If chess goes in the box, someone will eventually ask you about chess. Padding here is easy to spot and worse, easy to stumble over.
One question settles this. If an interviewer brings it up, could you hold a conversation about it for two or three minutes without straining? If not, cut it.
Category barely matters. Sports, cooking, music, photography, languages, gardening, gaming, volunteering, whatever it happens to be. There’s no hierarchy of hobbies that programs are secretly ranking.
Specific beats unusual, every time. You don’t need a rare hobby. You need a clearly described one.
Here’s the gap between weak and strong, side by side.
Weak: Reading books.
Better: Historical fiction and biographies; I especially enjoy books about migration, culture, and medicine.
Weak: I like Cooking.
Better: Cooking South Asian dishes and experimenting with regional recipes; I often host weekend meals for friends.
Weak: Running and fitness.
Better: Distance running; I train several mornings a week and enjoy preparing for local 5K and 10K races.
Weak: I like to do Photography.
Better: Street photography, particularly architecture and everyday life in new cities; I enjoy documenting places while traveling.
Weak: I like to watch cricket
Better: Cricket enthusiast and weekend player; I enjoy both playing and following international matches.
This one’s useful for IMG applicants. It reads as genuinely yours, and it doesn’t strain to connect the hobby back to medicine, which is a trap a lot of applicants fall into.
Weak: I like listening to music.
Better: Classical piano and learning new pieces; I have played since childhood and occasionally perform for family and friends.
Weak: I like to go to hiking.
Better: Hiking and exploring national parks; I enjoy planning day hikes and discovering new trails whenever I travel.
Weak: I like to do gardening.
Better: Home gardening, especially growing herbs and experimenting with container gardening in small spaces.
Notice what these don’t do:
One concrete detail, then they stop. And to be clear, this isn’t a list of the best hobbies for residency. That list doesn’t exist. The best hobby to put down is the one you actually do and can talk about without effort.
A question that comes up constantly among IMG applicants: will a US program even know what my hobby is?
The answer isn’t to swap in something that sounds more American. It’s to describe your own interest clearly enough that a stranger can follow it.
Cricket, badminton, calligraphy, poetry, traditional cooking, a regional instrument, cultural festivals, community work, languages. All fine. All yours.
Compare:
Cricket.
Weekend cricket player: I enjoy batting and following international Test matches.
The second gives an interviewer somewhere to go, even one who has never watched a match in their life. That’s the whole point.
The other instinct I see is treating hobbies as damage control. A gap year, a lower score, thin US clinical experience.
It doesn’t work, and honestly the box is far too small to carry that kind of weight. Hobbies humanize your profile. They don’t explain your clinical record. Gaps belong in your personal statement or an interview answer. Let this section do its own small job.
We help IMGs build every part of the application to sound honest and sound like them, from experiences and the personal statement to the details that get overlooked.
| Generic | Stronger |
| Reading | Historical fiction and physician biographies |
| Traveling | Exploring local food and architecture while traveling |
| Cooking | Experimenting with South Asian and Mediterranean recipes |
| Music | Playing acoustic guitar and learning fingerstyle arrangements |
| Sports | Weekend cricket and recreational badminton |
| Fitness | Distance running and training for local 5K races |
| Photography | Street photography focused on architecture |
| Movies | International cinema, especially historical dramas |
| Art | Watercolor painting, especially landscapes |
| Gaming | Strategy games and cooperative board games |
Read the right column again. Nothing there is more impressive than what’s on the left. Same hobby. One extra detail.
That’s really all this is. You’re not trying to sound impressive in 300 characters, you’re trying to sound like a specific person doing a specific thing.
Hobbies you don’t have: If it went in because it sounded good, take it out. Someone will ask.
Word salad: Reading, traveling, cooking, music, sports. Five words, zero information.
Achievements in disguise: This isn’t a second CV. Awards have their own section.
Anything you already described elsewhere: If your volunteer project has a full experience entry, don’t spend these 300 characters repeating it.
Anything you can’t discuss: AAMC says plainly that what’s in your application may come up during interviews. Assume every line is a possible question.
One thing I’d push back on: a lot of guides tell applicants that ordinary hobbies are bad. Cooking isn’t bad. Travel isn’t bad. Reading isn’t bad. The hobby was never the problem. The wording was, and it’s the same wording problem behind most other ERAS mistakes IMGs make.
Interviewers want easy openings, and this section hands them one. Being ready to talk about each one naturally is part of wider residency interview preparation.
“I saw you play cricket. How long have you been playing?”
“You mentioned photography. What kind?”
“You cook. What do you usually make?”
Friendly questions. But a blank answer still makes for a strange thirty seconds, so have something ready for each item you list.
The 30-second rule. For every hobby in that box, know:
Half a minute of real detail does the job. It’s a conversation, not a presentation.
| Activity | Best ERAS location |
| Casual guitar playing | Hobbies & Interests |
| Captain of university cricket team | Experiences |
| Won a national photography competition | Honors & Awards |
| Volunteer teaching program | Volunteer/service experience |
| Published research | Scholarly Work |
| Long-term community leadership | Experiences |
| Cooking as a casual interest | Hobbies & Interests |
Rough rule: if the activity involved real responsibility, leadership, teaching, service, or a formal win, it deserves a proper entry, not a line in a tiny box.
You get up to 10 experiences, three of which you can mark as most meaningful with their own descriptions. Don’t shrink something substantial into a hobby just because that’s where it started, our guide on choosing your most meaningful ERAS experiences covers how to write those properly.
Before you hit submit:
The rest of your ERAS application tells programs what you’ve accomplished. This box tells them a little about who did the accomplishing.
Don’t spend a week agonizing over this box. It’s 300 characters, and it isn’t the thing that decides your match. But do give it twenty honest minutes instead of ninety careless seconds, because it’s the one place where a program meets you rather than your file. And remember that once you certify and submit, the application locks. There’s no going back to fix a line you rushed.
Need a second pair of eyes on the rest of it? The hobbies box is the smallest piece of a much bigger document, and most applicants put only a few hours into an ERAS CV that program directors will use to decide whether to read any further. IMG Helping Hands works through the whole portfolio with you: structuring your CV so your strongest experience isn’t buried, framing your US clinical experience and research the way programs actually read them, filling the sections applicants tend to leave thin, and editing your personal statement so it adds to your CV instead of repeating it. Explore ERAS CV building and portfolio services and get yours finished well before the deadline.
Every box in ERAS, even a 300-character one, is a chance to read as a real person instead of a score report. We help IMGs get all of them right. Here’s how:
Two or three real, specific interests that show something about you outside medicine and that you’d be comfortable discussing in an interview.
300, maximum.
If you have genuine interests worth sharing, yes. The section is optional, but it’s an easy way to add some personality to an otherwise clinical profile.
Sports, music, cooking, photography, reading, hiking, art, gaming, gardening, cultural activities. Any of them work. How you describe it matters far more than which one you pick.
Yes. Anything in your application is fair game for conversation, so only list what you’re happy to talk about.
Articles published by IMG Helping Hands are prepared by our team using information from direct experience, publicly available resources, and educational references. AI tools may be used to assist with drafting, proofreading, and formatting; however, all content undergoes review and approval before publication.
The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Requirements, policies, and processes may change over time. Readers should consult official sources for the most current information.
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