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.
If you want to ensure success for your med school application, you have to exert effort in writing an effective personal statement for medical school. MIT Career Development Center shares some interesting ideas regarding writing a noteworthy personal statement.
Make your personal statement for medical school personal
According to MIT Career Development Center:
Make the essay personal. Try not to simply repeat the information that can be read on the AMCAS application. Provide the reader with an inside view on your thoughts, interests, and motivation to go into the medical profession.
You have to be more creative than usual, and repeating the details listed on your resume is not a good example of creativity. Your admissions essay is your chance to reveal yourself and dreams to the admissions panel. Take this chance and give them some unique perspectives about you.
Give your reasons and motivations
Another tip from MIT Career Development Center says that:
Make your motivation and drive clear to the reader. The admissions officer wants to get a sense from the essay that you are extremely interested in medicine and motivated to enter medical school. Medical school is very challenging and admissions wants to know that you know this and that your motivation and interest out weighs the challenges and will help you overcome the hurdles you encounter.
Just remember that when you talk about your reasons and motivations, you should use a sincere and honest voice. You shouldn’t make up stories or excuses. This will clearly reflect on your writing. Instead, have a good assessment of yourself, your goals, dreams, and perspectives.
Make your admissions esay flawless
Create a well-written document. Your essay is an sample of your writing abilities. It is important that you convey your thoughts clearly, grammatically correct, and effectively in your essay.
This simply means that if you want to make your essay attention-grabbing, you have to check your grammar to perfection. You need to edit and proofread your personal statement several times. You can also let other people read and comment on your statement of purpose. If you don’t, then the admissions panel may consider this as recklessness, lack of focus, or enthusiasm on your part.
Capital Community College shares some tips on how to edit and proofread your statement of purpose. Here’s an excerpt:
Grammar checkers are also very good at picking up on passive verb constructions. Frequently, a sentence will be improved and your meaning will be more clear, more forceful, if you replace passive constructions with active verbs. But not always. Review the section on passive verbs to see those uses of the passive that are appropriate. If you’ve used the passive construction in an appropriate way, leave it alone, no matter what your grammar checker says.
In order to write an interesting statement of purpose, you have to make your essay personal, include your reasons and motivations, and edit and proofread your work several times. This may sound tedious, but the result will be worth it. You should be willing to take extra steps to make sure that you are submitting a winning application essay.,
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.
A successful career in the medical field is not built on your accomplishments alone. As a practicing physician, you must be able to interact with people that can help you make an illustrious career in medicine – your patients and your colleagues. Though a bedside manner is a typical trait that doctors should possess, there may be some individuals who might need a little reminder on what a little socialization and people skills can do for them.
Improving doctor-patient relationship
Though it’s usually kids who need to be won over by unfamiliar faces, doctors need to portray friendliness toward older patients as well. Doctors do this to gain the patient’s trust and once this trust is achieved, the healing process can begin. If you can get your patient to talk to you about what he or she has been feeling, you can do your job easier by making quick diagnoses and administering the proper treatment. Patients would find it easier to disclose what they are feeling to doctors who are approachable and seem genuinely willing to help.
Improving relationships with colleagues
Unless you’re a one-man team doing private practice in your fully-equipped private clinic, you’d have to interact favorably with other people as well. Hospitals employ other medical professionals who have different duties and tasks assigned to them. All of these people in one way or another help you in performing your duties as a physician. It’s important to foster good relationships with people in the workplace, including nurses, technicians, orderlies, and watch guards. Aside from forging a good working relationship with your colleagues, some of them may even wind up as life-long friendships that could enrich your life in many other aspects. Of course, be prepared to give as well, starting with complimenting and thanking them for a job well done.
It’s not enough to do a good job in operation table. To touch other people’s lives, you must do what you can to reach out and help.
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Not everyone who studied medicine for nearly a decade get to pursue a hospital career . Their medicine degrees, however, won’t be put to waste as the corporate world opens new doors to a different career path. Here are some positions where medical graduates are key players:
Genetic counseling
Genetics has become a tool for more than just tracing bloodlines. As a genetics counselor, a doctor confers with patients with genetic histories of disorders. Medical information about their background, analysis of their genetic patterns, and assessing the risks of disorders recurring in the present or future generation are done by genetics counselors. This position not only requires clinical duty, but also practice professional sympathy by providing emotional support and counseling. Medical graduates who want to go into this profession should have at least taken units of genetics, biology, psychology, and public health.
Medical examiner
After the success of many police-medical dramas and TV series, a lot of people, including medical students, have turned their aspirations toward becoming another Jordan Cavanaugh of Crossing Jordan or Dr. Al Robbins of CSI. These characters portrayed medical examiners employed by the police to investigate cases. Instead of pulling out stories from live patients, medical examiners find out the truth from the dead. The evidence culled by medical examiners play key roles in investigations as they can also be called to court to testify and present their findings. For those who want to enjoy a CSI-esque career, be prepared to take up or brush up on physiology, anatomy, pathology, biochemistry, and your carving skills.
Everybody wants to make a difference or make their mark in this world. Even when not in a hospital setting that doesn’t mean you can’t help others anymore. A medical degree can take you a long way, in whatever track you might want to pursue.
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By devoting hours meant for sleeping to studying in med school, you may be considered a “night owl”. But instead of looking for prey, med school owls keep their eyes on sheet after sheet of class readings, in preparation for the next day’s exam or recitation. While this may seem like the norm in med school, it’s a sorry state to be in especially if your health and class standing is put at risk. Here are a few tips to make all-nighters in med school easy as counting sheep.
Stay away from the sugar
While sugar and caffeine-laden food and drinks do keep you up, these affect your concentration the following day. Instead of downing pots of black coffee or consuming a big bag of candy-covered chocolates on the eve of an exam, try snacking on protein-rich food. Food rich in protein such as cheese can help increase your memory skills. Try snacking on crisp fresh fruits such as apples and pears for a natural pick-me-up effect minus the calories.
Catch some Zzz’s
Though this goes against the whole idea of an all-nighter, grab some sleep if you can. If you just want to take a nap, wake up, and go on studying, ask a classmate to wake you up at a desired time. As a medical student, you should already know that not getting enough sleep or rest can be detrimental to you. Not only will your health suffer from it, but you’ll also tend to perform poorly during daytime. Your concentration and moods are affected, the same way that your decision-making skills may be impaired due to the lack of sleep.
Frequent all-nighters can be avoided if you pay attention to your classes and find time to study during the day. Studies even show that students who pull all-nighters frequently just waste their efforts, as they become more prone to low GPAs. Don’t let all-nighters be your cover up for procrastinating, instead do what you need to do as soon as you can.
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Hospital dramas and shows have engrossed many viewers and made notable personalities such as Dr. McDreamy of Grey’s Anatomy and Dr. House of House, M.D. a household name. Audiences are entertained and educated with various medical conditions, diagnoses, and treatments that are featured in the captivating scenes of these medical shows. Despite the entertainment they provide, some viewers may be left in the dark when it comes to the hierarchy of the characters or hospital staff, say in ER or in Scrubs. Here’s a quick rundown of the titles carried by medical practitioners::
Chief attending
Dr. Richard Webber of Grey’s Anatomy carries the title of big honcho. As chief attending, he is responsible for keeping the entire hospital department running smoothly. The chief attending is considered the boss who makes big decisions or confers with the other big bosses (such as the private owners) for running the hospital.
Attending physicians
Attending physicians are doctors who have gained some experience in their field of specialization. This title may be assigned after finishing a certain period of training for the said specialization. Attending physicians may also head or hold officership positions in their sub-departments. They are responsible for heading a team of residents and interns as well. Attending physicians may conduct courses to interns in teaching hospitals.
Medical residents
Newly-proclaimed doctors, fresh from board and internship exams, are proclaimed medical residents in a hospital. They are doctors who can practice medicine under the watch of their supervisors, the attending physicians, and can now legally attend to patients. Medical residents do their fare share of teaching through medical interns.
Medical interns
After graduating from med school, you can start working in a hospital under the title of medical intern. Medical interns, though, are not yet licensed to practice medicine but are only allowed to observe and participate or “scrub in” for medical and surgical procedures.
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So what makes a doctor good? Is it the brains? Is it the people skills? Or, is it because one came from a reputable medical academic institution such as Harvard Medical School? Read on for a list of some of the qualities that help doctors become successful in the field despite the erratic schedules and the heavy caseloads.
Doctors must be people persons
Aside from being a medical maverick and genius, good doctors also need to have people skills, especially when interacting with a lot of patients, who may be confused or emotionally befuddled about their conditions. Breaking the bad news is also never easy for most doctors. Though this part of the job is also described as one of the hardest tasks doctors do, learning how to tell family members the right way takes time and experience.
Doctors must pay attention to detail
Dr. House is deemed the medical Sherlock Holmes due to his keen observations skills. In the TV series, House makes use of psychology and take hints his patients’ lives. Real-life doctors, on the other hand, should possess the same dogged interest even in the little things such as lumps that could turn into cancer or a twitch that may actually be a symptom of a life-threatening disease. Attention to detail makes the job of doctors easier, allowing them to diagnose and treat patients more effectively.
Doctors must value time and use it wisely
You don’t outgrow your schedules when you graduate from med school. In fact, doctors are known to lead such scheduled lives to make sense of all the things happening around them. Time management skills could be honed while still studying in med school. Consider making a time table of the things that you need to do such as studying for pharmacology from 8pm to 10pm. Be sure to accomplish your tasks up to 10pm, so you could go to that late dinner, have a night cap with friends, or hit the sack right after. Setting a deadline also encourages doctors to think faster and come up with solutions even in a short time.
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Being a medical student and a dutiful wife at the same time can prove to be a very challenging act. Both roles need your utmost commitment as each demands your dedication. With a new addition to the family, your attention is further divided. So how do you juggle these important roles?
Juggling spousal responsibilities and medical school work
As a wife, you are expected to provide a home for your husband. Though you two have pledged to take care of each other, a woman does so by setting up and maintaining a household for her husband. As a medical student, an extra load is added to your usual set of household chores. To be able to study for med school, you may look for domestic help if you can afford to. Having someone help out with the chores can free up more time for you to study without being too harassed.
Balancing marriage, medical school work, and parenting
It is always a struggle when a woman tries to do things for herself even though she has a family to take care of. Sadly, more women let go of their dreams because of the difficulty of this situation. Still, there are ways for you to compromise when facing a similar situation. Organize your activities by making a schedule. Plot your study sessions in convenient times like when your child is asleep or at school. Just don’t forget to spend quality time with your spouse and child every chance you get. Though it is important for you to study hard for medical school, it is also important that you be there for your child when he or she needs you the most.
If you are yet to start expanding your family of two, it would be wise to wait a few more years until you graduate or settle into your practice before having a baby. Though a baby will not spoil your prospects of becoming a doctor, the role of a parent would demand more from you. Having a baby after finishing medical school not only ensures that your studies have your undivided attention, but lets you savor the time as a parent without having to worry about your finals. Being married while in med school need not be as taxing as it seems to be, with someone to go home to after every day.
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