Advice on this Alcohol IA Write-up?

[mu2021]

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Just looking for some thoughts on how this IA explanation reads. Anything I should add, take out, or change?

"In September 2018, I was charged with a complicity and an alcohol policy violation. For the complicity, I was in a room in my dorm where people were drinking, and everyone ended up getting written up. Though I was not drinking, I violated the complicity policy by not leaving the room. As a result, I attended community programming meetings and was reminded that there are ways to meet new people away from alcohol. For the alcohol violation, I came back from a party severely intoxicated. An RA found me, and I ended up spending the rest of the night in the hospital. As a result, I interviewed our alcohol and drug prevention coordinator to write an essay on the effects of acute intoxication on yourself, those around you, and the healthcare professionals that treat you, paid a fine, and took an alcohol education class. I take full responsibility for both violations. I put myself in the situations, broke both the University policy and the law, and had to deal with the resulting consequences. I treat both as wake-up calls and learning experiences. Afterwards, I doubled down on my studies, dedicated more time to volunteering, sought out research opportunities, and have tried to be to most responsible person I can be, with no further incidents."

Thanks

 

[confusedmonkey123]

Just looking for some thoughts on how this IA explanation reads. Anything I should add, take out, or change?

"In September 2018, I was charged with a complicity and an alcohol policy violation. For the complicity, I was in a room in my dorm where people were drinking, and everyone ended up getting written up. Though I was not drinking, I violated the complicity policy by not leaving the room. As a result, I attended community programming meetings and was reminded that there are ways to meet new people away from alcohol. For the alcohol violation, I came back from a party severely intoxicated. An RA found me, and I ended up spending the rest of the night in the hospital. As a result, I interviewed our alcohol and drug prevention coordinator to write an essay on the effects of acute intoxication on yourself, those around you, and the healthcare professionals that treat you, paid a fine, and took an alcohol education class. I take full responsibility for both violations. I put myself in the situations, broke both the University policy and the law, and had to deal with the resulting consequences. I treat both as wake-up calls and learning experiences. Afterwards, I doubled down on my studies, dedicated more time to volunteering, sought out research opportunities, and have tried to be to most responsible person I can be, with no further incidents."

Thanks

I’m in this same situation. Do you think this incident negatively impacted your chances at being accepted into medical school?

 

[YCAGA]

😳 first all the tone of your writing is fairly informal which isn’t how you want to sound in this situation. Anyways, the most glaring thing is you mention you were “severely intoxicated” and spent the night in the hospital. Why would you ever disclose this to a medical school?! This is like triple bad judgement. 1) you got so drunk you had to go to the hospital 2) you got caught by your school 3) you are telling medical schools way too much detail. Honesty is good, but too much honesty is just shooting yourself in the foot. Why not also tell them how many times you threw up that night?

The good news is that alcohol violations due to underage drinking are the lowest severity of any IA and 99% of schools understand getting drunk in undergrad isn’t going to make you fail out of medical school or be a bad doctor. Since 99% of medical students and doctors did that at one point or another…🤡

This can be 3-4 sentences max. I can rewrite it in the morning but hopefully this gives you a good starting point to make some edits…

 

[YCAGA]

Also you can’t really say you treat both incidents as a wake up call since presumably they happened on different nights. Sounds like the least effective wake up call ever if you ended up in the hospital after the first wake up call.

 

[Monkeymojo]

I agree with the above poster and think you are giving away too many red flags for free. I would rework it to just state that you've received two alcohol-related IAs, one for associating with intoxicated individuals inside the dorms and one for returning intoxicated to the dorms and that's like it for the what you did wrong portion of the statement. Why tie words like "severely intoxicated" to yourself if you don't have to.

 

[mu2021]

Not sure why this post blew up a year later but wanted to provide an update. Applied to 25 schools this cycle, variety of tiers, and received 4 II which turned into an acceptance at a school I am thrilled to be matriculating to in the fall. Reading back, definitely agree that I wrote much more than I needed to and believe the incidents negatively affected my cycle (though I was still successful). It's unfortunate, but straight honesty is NOT the best policy for things like this and I wish I would've put a more favorable twist on what happened,

 

[YCAGA]

Not sure why this post blew up a year later but wanted to provide an update. Applied to 25 schools this cycle, variety of tiers, and received 4 II which turned into an acceptance at a school I am thrilled to be matriculating to in the fall. Reading back, definitely agree that I wrote much more than I needed to and believe the incidents negatively affected my cycle (though I was still successful). It's unfortunate, but straight honesty is NOT the best policy for things like this and I wish I would've put a more favorable twist on what happened,

No idea this post got bumped a year later lol. Congrats on the acceptance and I am glad it worked out for you. Hopefully others can learn from this as well

 

[wysdoc]

Not sure why this post blew up a year later but wanted to provide an update. Applied to 25 schools this cycle, variety of tiers, and received 4 II which turned into an acceptance at a school I am thrilled to be matriculating to in the fall. Reading back, definitely agree that I wrote much more than I needed to and believe the incidents negatively affected my cycle (though I was still successful). It's unfortunate, but straight honesty is NOT the best policy for things like this and I wish I would've put a more favorable twist on what happened,

There's no favorable twist you could have applied to this, except as @gonnif said to have made it much less wordy. I had to read that twice to understand that there were 2 separate incidents