Do you think writing a personal statement for medical school is daunting? Well, it might be so, but with some helpful tips, you can write an excellent personal statement for med school without much difficulty encountered by other applicants. KU has some tips that could help you make the task a whole a lot easier to bear. Here are some of them:
Make your personal statement for med school personal
According to KU:
Don’t derive your statement from a friend’s essay, or an example from a website, and don’t use quotes or cliches. Use your own words!
Your statement of purpose should be about you, and there’s no easy way out of this. You cannot simply borrow other people’s works and present them as your own. That would be plagiarism, and this has serious repercussions on your application once caught. Instead, write about your own experiences. And most importantly write through your own voice.
Organize your ideas
Another tip says:
Let your structure flow from the content you have chosen. Many essays use both time and another type of element, e.g., a chronology of personal stories, life changing events, places you’ve lived, important activities, influential people, or recurring themes.
If you organize your ideas and sentences, your readers will find your essay easy to read and understand. A well-organized essay will make the readers remember it well. It will highlight your arguments and your essay would appear more persuasive.
Here’s another excerpt:
Saying you want to help people and like science just scratches the surface. It doesn’t differentiate you from any of the other candidates who are applying, and doesn’t differentiate the role you desire from the countless other careers that involve helping with science. What can you do as a member of the profession that you could not do in other professions?
Your essay should be self-reflective. Don’t be shallow. The admissions panel wants a mature mind that does not just dwell on the surface of things. Take your discussions to a deeper level, one that best exhibits the use of critical thinking.
Remember that:
Admission committee members are looking for a passion for the profession. One way to convey your passion, is to use emotional language. Write and talk about your feelings!
Your essay is the best way to share your passion. Your passion will tell readers how eager you must be to become a doctor or to specialize in a specific field of medicine. This can also be a way to appeal to the emotional side of your readers who might relate to your passion and enthusiasm.
Purdue OWL has this advice regarding personal statement writing:
Type and proofread your essay very carefully. Many admissions officers say that good written skills and command of correct use of language are important to them as they read these statements. Express yourself clearly and concisely. Adhere to stated word limits.
Writing a personal statement for medical school shouldn’t be too difficult. Just follow the tips above. Make your essay personal, organize your ideas well, show your passion, and be meticulous. These will pave the road to admission success.
Many websites that give tips on writing personal statements for medical school always emphasize on creativity, originality, and uniqueness. Well, all these elements are important. But in order to secure better chances for admission, you should also pay attention to the basics of writing an admission essay. Time to Edit Blog shares some basic tips on how to write a personal statement that will stand out. Here are some of them:
Follow the instructions given by the specific school
While most schools will require a personal statement, they may ask you to write about different things.
Some schools have their own set of questions for you to answer through your essay. This is why you have to inquire first about the requirements before you write your first draft. This way, you know what kind of topics to choose from and how to make your essay more noteworthy.
However, other schools may want to know about more specific aspects about yourself. So, does this mean if you are applying to 7 schools, you have to write 7 different personal statements? No. Usually, students will write a personal statement and change certain parts of it for different schools.
Just make sure that you change some details every time you write for certain schools. Personalize your essays according to their standards.
Don’t make excuses on your personal statement for medical school
If you want to explain a particular grade, you can use an addendum (just another separate short paragraph paper you hand in to the admissions committee offering an explanation, if one is necessary.
As much as possible, concentrate on your accomplishments. A personal statement should only be few pages long. This is why you have to choose a subject matter that could help you win the attention of the admissions panel and make them see you as a good candidate.
Be unique
An admissions committee member has to read thousands of applications, half of which will likely all have the required GPA/Test scores to get into the program. So you absolutely have to stand out in the applications pool. Every person has a story, this is your chance to tell yours.
You can be unique by speaking through your own voice. You should also include unique experiences and add details. Just make sure that you write about specific experiences and not too general themes. This excerpt from another article shares some insights about this:
When writing any kind of essay (including an essay for a class), it’s important to talk about specific experiences instead of general ones. Otherwise, your essay could be writing by anyone, as opposed to you. Instead of writing, “My parents are immigrants, and I learned a lot about hard work from them,” explain in detail specifically what you learned about hard work from them. Tell stories of things they did that demonstrated their work ethic and what you learned from these.
Before you write your personal statement for medical school, it pays to know the basics of admissions essay writing. Again, you have to inquire about the requirements and follow the instructions given by the school. Don’t make excuses for your failures and be unique.
Before you write your personal statement for medical school, it is important to be aware of the myths surrounding personal statements and school applications in general. Knowing the myths and the realities behind writing personal statements will help you write your own. Student Life Blogs of the University of Toronto shares some common myths regarding statement of purpose writing.
Don’t write about topics not related to medicine
If you are an accomplished musician, artist or athlete, you won’t want to write an entire essay on this topic, but if some significant activity or event in the past influenced your path, then, by all means, mention it in your personal statement. With their emphasis on the holistic review of applicants, admissions committees are seeking diverse applicants and the definition of diversity is broad. No one expects that you have spent your entire life in the library, a lab or a doctor’s office.
It is all right to write about topics that are not really related to medicine. However, you have to make sure that the subject matter you choose is related to the hows and whys of your decision to be in medical school.
Don’t write about events that took place before college
Your goal is to give the admissions committee a complete picture of who you are, what motivates you, and how your interests have evolved. For most of the clients with whom I work, these pivotal experiences occurred well before they made the decision to apply to medical school; this makes sense since it takes years to complete the prerequisites that allow you to apply. While you don’t want to dwell on something that happened in the distant past, if one of your most motivating experiences happened in high school or even grade school, then you should mention it.
It’s all right to talk about experiences that happened way back in the past as long as those events and experiences have everything to do with why you are interest6ed to pursue a career in the field of medicine. The bottom line is that whatever experience, thoughts, or feelings you share, it should be related to your application.
Don’t write about negative things on your personal statement for medical school
You never want to bad-mouth anything or anyone in your essay, yet I find that this advice extends to “never write about a negative or less-than-sunny experience.” For example, if you had a poor undergraduate academic performance because a close family member got sick or you had transition issues and were terribly homesick and immature, you should address the negative experience and explain what happened and why.
The most important thing to remember is that you have to bring to the surface the brighter side of things. If you talk about negative experiences, you have to end your story with something positive such as lessons learned and knowledge discovered.
You really have to exert effort into writing your personal statement. Never think that the admissions committee will not read your essay. According to another article:
For better or worse, counselors do read personal statements, and in hundreds of cases, it’s for worse. Many applicants simply recite their extracurricular activities or fall back on uninspired chestnuts such as, “I want to go to UW-Madison because I really love the Badgers.” Some don’t even bother writing one at all.
Your personal statement for med school is your passport to the prestigious university that you want to be part of. Keeping the myths mentioned above in mind will help you write a personal statement that could win the hearts of the essay readers.
