Focusing my personal statement- I think I am going crazy!

[Maschka1]

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Hello everyone,

I am struggling with focusing my personal statement. I want to share so much that I have written 10 different personal statements and hate them all. I know, no one can really make the decision for me, but I am curious if anyone has hints or tips for how they finally chose a topic and stuck with it.

Currently I have many angles:
Comical story from working as a tech
Life long struggle with a disability
An experience with a bad vet that resulted in losing a pet and spurring me to be better
A complicated and baffling neuro condition that caused the loss of one of my dogs
the moment when I realized I wanted to be a vet
How working in another industry helped me to realize veterinary medicine was my calling
Explanation of why I am a non traditional student and my previous GPA is not reflective of my abilities.

I dont want to be too cliche but I also dont want to be so far off in my statement that people wonder what it has to do with vet school...lol

I have been trying to use the whole supplemental to my advantage to get all my information across. Does anyone think that working in another field would count as unique experience, or do you think that section is set aside for something truly unique? I guess I am not sure what constitutes unique.

Ack! I feel like the more I work on this the worse and more tangled it gets. please tell me I am not the only one who wants to crawl under my desk and cry😳

 

[that redhead]

Hello everyone,

I am struggling with focusing my personal statement. I want to share so much that I have written 10 different personal statements and hate them all. I know, no one can really make the decision for me, but I am curious if anyone has hints or tips for how they finally chose a topic and stuck with it.

Currently I have many angles:
Comical story from working as a tech
Life long struggle with a disability
An experience with a bad vet that resulted in losing a pet and spurring me to be better
A complicated and baffling neuro condition that caused the loss of one of my dogs
the moment when I realized I wanted to be a vet
How working in another industry helped me to realize veterinary medicine was my calling
Explanation of why I am a non traditional student and my previous GPA is not reflective of my abilities.

First of all, I'd stay away from your experience with a bad vet. It doesn't look good to bash your potential future peers, no matter how much it may or may not occur in the profession or how much it helped to make you want to be better. I'd also be careful with the last point about your GPA, etc, because (as discussed somewhere else in the forum, and of course I don't remember where) there's a fine line between sounding whiny and making excuses and having a good explanation. Plus, there's another 5000 characters allotted to an explanation if you so choose, so I'd think that bit would be better used in the explanation portion of the application.

I think incorporting the other points (a comical story, struggle that you've come out on top of, working in other career that helped you to pick vet med instead) is the best path. This is way easier said than done, though, because I'm in the exact same position you are with literally six different statements and none of them worth anything to me right now 😛 Best of luck with yours!

 

[moosenanny]

I agree with That Redhead about what NOT to include.

As far as what TO talk about, I'd open with your comical tech story as a hook to grab interest (limit it to one long paragraph), then you can talk about working in another industry, followed by a transition into the moment you decided you wanted to be a vet (again, a paragraph-ish), and then in your conclusion you can talk about overcoming your disability and how that has given you the qualities you need to become a vet (perseverance, courage, etc.)

You PS doesn't have to just be about one thing. The more multi-dimensional you make it, the more successful it will be. Just be sure to use transitions properly so that it doesn't look like three or four disparate ideas glued together.

And yes, take advantage of supplemental essays to fit in anything or expand upon something not discussed fully/at all in the PS.

Good luck, and happy writing!

 

[DVMorBust]

I'd also agree with not writing about your GPA or anything negative in your PS. I have a friend who was applying to med school, and used her PS to go into a lot of her GPA not being up to snuff as it followed her life journey/etc... (really well-written PS, but totally bit her in the butt). Turns out that the person who did her interview ONLY had her PS to go off of (not the person who did the initial 'can this person hack it' cut), and as a result spent the entire time grilling her on study skills, etc. instead of conducting an actual interview.

Granted, this was a specific med school with a specific admissions procedure - but try to keep things in their own section (GPA in explanation statement, etc.) because you never know if someone's going to read your whole application, or if different people read parts of it and they total up the scores after the fact, or whatever.