How to Effectively Use Anecdotes in Your Personal Statement for Medical School
Learning how to effectively use anecdotes in your personal statement for medical school can help keep your personal statement personal. This is often the advice of admission
experts when asked what it takes to make an interesting personal statement for medical school. Aside from starting off your personal statement with a captivating one-liner, keeping the tone of your personal statement reader-friendly is another important way to get the attention of admission officers.
Personal anecdotes to spice up a personal statement for medical school
Using a personal and interesting anecdote is one effective way to personalize your
medical admission essay. A personal statement for medical school that revolves around personal details about the applicant will make the applicant sound more human, and his or her experiences more real. Stories that the officer can read will put him or her in the experience of the applicant and give him or her what he or she wants: an idea of who the applicant is. Of course, how the essay is written, how and what kinds of words are used, and how the ideas are brought together will also give one an idea of the applicant’s skills with grammar and written communication. Using personal anecdotes will give the reader a deeper sense of the personality of the applicant.
Using personal anecdotes also lowers the risk of making an essay that is too wordy. A personal statement for medical school may at times require a bit of technical know-how here and there, but in general, you use simple words to get the point across. If you keep it simple, you avoid using words that will require a reader to open a dictionary in order to understand your essay.
As much as possible, anecdotes should be about certain experiences that played a part on your decision to become a doctor. The worn out phrase ‘I want to help people’ is no longer what admission officers like to hear from applicants. They want your personal essay for medical school to show, rather than tell them, why you want to become a doctor. You can best do this using anecdotes as concrete examples.
Choosing what anecdote to tell
One dilemma that stumps most applicants is choosing what anecdote to tell. With all the experiences you’ve had in your lifetime, there are a lot of personal experiences that you can choose from. But how do you choose the right one?
The best course would be to know what characteristic that you are most proud of and choose an anecdote that shows how you exercised that characteristic in real life. For example, instead of saying that you are a person of compassion, tell of the time when you used your vacation to go on a mission to Africa to help feed hungry refugees. If you want to tell of your ability to stay calm under pressure, tell of the time when you and a bunch of people got stuck in the elevator and how you handled the situation so that no one would freak out. Choosing anecdotes carefully is very important, because even with the right anecdote you still run the risk of sounding too cocky, or worse, someone who likes to embellish. Keep your words simple and stick to the truth, because the personal statement is not really the place for your achievements, real or imagined.
In the end, you can choose to use different anecdotes for different parts of your essay. Or you can use one anecdote for the whole essay and use it to tie the whole thing together. Using personal anecdotes is a good way to keep the essay an interesting read. However, you have to make sure that the anecdote fits and that all of it is truthful.
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