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CBass2288
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not an admin.
it's asking you to answer other impactful experiences that haven't been mentioned. choose something that impacted you. if you learned nothing or write about nothing else, how do they know the impact it had on you? yes, write about how this experience shaped and will shape your professional goals, identity, and perspective.
it's asking you to answer other impactful experiences that haven't been mentioned. choose something that impacted you. if you learned nothing or write about nothing else, how do they know the impact it had on you? yes, write about how this experience shaped and will shape your professional goals, identity, and perspective.
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Other Impactful Experiences Essay: Exploring Your Unique Story | SDN
Beginning with the 2024 cycle, the AAMC allowed AMCAS and ERAS applicants an opportunity to describe Other Impactful Experiences (OIE) that have helped
www.studentdoctor.net
It depends how you manage the space constraints. Other secondaries may allow you to go into more depth.
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polymerization
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This might be a little obvious, but worth saying: you don't have to weigh every detail within your life story equally.
The goal of the OIE essay is to discuss meaningful deviations from the average applicant's experience, whom you can assume is relatively privileged in every way possible. The average applicant is someone who has genuinely never wanted for anything and for whom the bottleneck in this process is the effort associated with simply performing well enough to meet metric averages for their target institutions.
This is why we have so many applicants complaining about this essay and feeling "disadvantaged" in comparison to people who have actually had challenges meeting basic needs. From their vantage, everything that goes in this box is an exaggeration, and anyone who uses it is disingenuous at best and overtly manipulative at worst. For them, effort predictably correlates with outcome (which is generally true only under privileged circumstances), so you can't blame them for having little patience for anybody that claims this process could possibly be about anything else.
Don't take on that vantage when you're writing your own story. The people who are actually trained to read for this essay have had some training and are sensitive to the reality that living in a "high-crime and poverty-stricken neighborhood of an inner city" understandably imposes academic and personal barriers that the average applicant cannot even genuinely imagine.
There is real value in experience. Don't limit your story to the experiences you think will be legible to someone you already expect to misunderstand you. In some ways, the ignorance around this box is precisely why we need it: the people ignorant to the implications of injustice are not suddenly going to "wise up" once they attain even more social status. We need physicians who have a personal understanding of what it's like for marginalized patients, period. Can't teach that at school...let the rich kids cry about it.
The goal of the OIE essay is to discuss meaningful deviations from the average applicant's experience, whom you can assume is relatively privileged in every way possible. The average applicant is someone who has genuinely never wanted for anything and for whom the bottleneck in this process is the effort associated with simply performing well enough to meet metric averages for their target institutions.
This is why we have so many applicants complaining about this essay and feeling "disadvantaged" in comparison to people who have actually had challenges meeting basic needs. From their vantage, everything that goes in this box is an exaggeration, and anyone who uses it is disingenuous at best and overtly manipulative at worst. For them, effort predictably correlates with outcome (which is generally true only under privileged circumstances), so you can't blame them for having little patience for anybody that claims this process could possibly be about anything else.
Don't take on that vantage when you're writing your own story. The people who are actually trained to read for this essay have had some training and are sensitive to the reality that living in a "high-crime and poverty-stricken neighborhood of an inner city" understandably imposes academic and personal barriers that the average applicant cannot even genuinely imagine.
There is real value in experience. Don't limit your story to the experiences you think will be legible to someone you already expect to misunderstand you. In some ways, the ignorance around this box is precisely why we need it: the people ignorant to the implications of injustice are not suddenly going to "wise up" once they attain even more social status. We need physicians who have a personal understanding of what it's like for marginalized patients, period. Can't teach that at school...let the rich kids cry about it.
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Disagreeing with polymerization here. While your experiences are valid and appropriate for this essay, we are looking for you to describe any experience/circumstance in your background that had an impact on you. It doesn’t have to be a sob story, just a formative experience. I have seen essays written about having a serious illness, growing up as an identical twin, being homeschooled, being trans, and other experiences that gave us insight into the applicant’s identity. Since you have chosen to write about the experiences that disadvantaged you, let us know how those experiences shaped your character. We don’t need every detail about the negative experiences; the essay is about YOU, it’s not about how many bad things happened to you.
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