Case Western Secondary Help Please

[xxbruinxx]

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😀 hi

this is their prompt:

1. The Admissions Committee is interested in gaining insight into you as a person. Type or Copy and Paste a brief essay on a subject outside of medicine, which has been an area of great interest to you.

(what do they mean by subject??...as in a course or a topic of study? or subject meaning just something that interests you, as in an area of interest ???)

If i'm being anal and reading into this a bit much...feel free to let me know 😀

 

[xxbruinxx]

maybe this is a stupid question, but would "childhood cancer" be a subject outside of medicine...?

I had a cancer experience when i was younger, and i'm really interested in this subject...i would talk about attending conferences, symposiums, etc. etc.

but "cancer" doesn't sound like a subject outside of med.

thoughts?

 

[fiddler]

I think you can pretty much expect that cancer is medicine related.

Talk about something else. Someone said they wrote about the NY yankees!?

Talk about something that you are interested in and have some expertise in.

fiddler

 

[xxbruinxx]

I think you can pretty much expect that cancer is medicine related.

Talk about something else. Someone said they wrote about the NY yankees!?

Talk about something that you are interested in and have some expertise in.

fiddler

so it seems from your reply that "subject" doesn't mean "subject in school", but rather some area of interest....cars, money, girls ( 🙂 )

 

[bellydancer]

Maybe something unique about your family or so, uh not girls or pornstars or mustangs.

By the way, is thiis a secondary question?

 

[fiddler]

Be creative but i wouldn't talk about girls and how to pick them up. It might upset the elders on the adcom! 😀

But yeah, I read the question as wider than subject in school because they might suck and you might not be interested in any of them.

Yes this is a secondar question. The only one for Case.

fiddler

 

[Camillekc]

Just a question, don't look down on me, but is anyone else really tempted to just throw in an essay from a lit class or something? Every night I lie in bed and wish I was a comp lit major, so it interests me, but even with some tweaking, it's still probably going to look like an english paper.

p.s. I'm not lazy, I'm just... okay, lazy.

 

[Kazema]

I wrote an essay about soccer, it was the best secondary essay I wrote all year.

 

[DarkFark]

Talk about something else. Someone said they wrote about the NY yankees!?

Yes I did!!! And I got a freaking interview...


Here's an excerpt:

Last year was brutal. Watching my team lose the ALCS was like watching Bambi’s mother die, except drawn out over an entire week. The end of game five was the only event in my life that ever drove me to drink out of pure misery. I hit my trusty bottle of Jameson, and I hit it hard. My roommate came home during the resultant stupor and bore witness to some of my musings: “Mariano came in, got three outs, and it still counts as a blown save. The box score says BS. I’ll tell you what else that stands for…”.

 

[Risa]

Until high school I was unschooled, so I wrote about that. I used it to show that I'm the kind of self-directed, integrative learner who will excel in med school (keeping it a pertinent part of my application by showing them a new facet of myself, while still making a pitch as a future med student).

 

[TheMightyAngus]

Until high school I was unschooled, so I wrote about that. I used it to show that I'm the kind of self-directed, integrative learner who will excel in med school (keeping it a pertinent part of my application by showing them a new facet of myself, while still making a pitch as a future med student).

Sorry, I dont mean to pick on you, but reading this raised a couple question. Where is the line drawn between revealing your strengths and sounding pompous? How can anyone tell if they will excel in med school, if they haven't even been accepted yet?

Is it possible to spin off any life experience into something inherently unique? I think a lot of people make things up that don't even make sense but sound scholarly. Integrative learner? What's that? Should I have discussed how my experience in theater enables me to incorporate performity into my teaching, or how I have an acute awareness of the importance of rhetoric in the patient-physician relationship because I majored in English?

Sorry again for using your post as a sounding board, but I find myself trying scholarize my secondaries unnecessarily and I'm ranting about it.

 

[fiddler]

DarkFark,

that is hilarious. I can't even imagine what the rest of the essay is like.

fiddler

 

[xxbruinxx]

what's the line b/w being professional and too "friendly" on secondaries....i mean for example the drinking essay, it seemed like something i would write over AIM...obviously it makes no sense my saying this since they did get an interview, but just wondering...how do i know whether to write straight (very clean, professional) or more loosely as the excerpt above?

 

[Risa]

Sorry, I dont mean to pick on you, but reading this raised a couple question. Where is the line drawn between revealing your strengths and sounding pompous? How can anyone tell if they will excel in med school, if they haven't even been accepted yet?

Is it possible to spin off any life experience into something inherently unique? I think a lot of people make things up that don't even make sense but sound scholarly. Integrative learner? What's that? Should I have discussed how my experience in theater enables me to incorporate performity into my teaching, or how I have an acute awareness of the importance of rhetoric in the patient-physician relationship because I majored in English?

Sorry again for using your post as a sounding board, but I find myself trying scholarize my secondaries unnecessarily and I'm ranting about it.

Hey Angus,
No worries. The way I phrased my post definitely sounded pompous... poorly done on my part. The actual essay, I think, is not. I definitely didn't make any statements in the "scholarized" form I did to try to summarize the process in a single sentence. The essay tells a story, but doesn't spell out its message the way I did here. The surgeon I worked for this summer read it for me and called it "mindblowing" (sorry--pompous again? but it's true.. and was very flattering, especially since he's a pretty critical guy).

Of course no one can tell whether they'll excel in med school... but the whole point of your application is to convince the adcom that you're a good bet on their part to do just that. Keeping in mind that your application is meant to advertise you as a candidate is important to maintaining its focus (although of course not making such advertisements explicit).

I'd be happy to tell about how unschooling has helped me to view things in a more integrative fashion, if you feel like messaging me, by the way. And by the way, I don't think using phrases like "make things up that don't even make sense" and "pompous" are very productive or constructive ways to frame your criticism... tact would have been nice.

 

[TheMightyAngus]

Hey Angus,
No worries. The way I phrased my post definitely sounded pompous... poorly done on my part. The actual essay, I think, is not. I definitely didn't make any statements in the "scholarized" form I did to try to summarize the process in a single sentence. The essay tells a story, but doesn't spell out its message the way I did here. The surgeon I worked for this summer read it for me and called it "mindblowing" (sorry--pompous again? but it's true.. and was very flattering, especially since he's a pretty critical guy).

Of course no one can tell whether they'll excel in med school... but the whole point of your application is to convince the adcom that you're a good bet on their part to do just that. Keeping in mind that your application is meant to advertise you as a candidate is important to maintaining its focus (although of course not making such advertisements explicit).

I'd be happy to tell about how unschooling has helped me to view things in a more integrative fashion, if you feel like messaging me, by the way. And by the way, I don't think using phrases like "make things up that don't even make sense" and "pompous" are very productive or constructive ways to frame your criticism... tact would have been nice.

Being tactful is definitely more polite, but not economical on a message board. Easier to exaggerate to get your point across. Apologies.