going crazy

[Ema]

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I have trouble with PS, I just can not come up with good stuff.
Anybody up for yet another PS read? Please.... 😉

 

[CuttinEmUp]

no offense, but I think you might be trying to hard to write the "perfect" ps...going crazy trying to think of what adcoms might like to see.


honestly, my advice is to just write your life story. there is nothing to think about, just write about your honest experiences and do it in a creative way that is grammatically correct and cohesive.

when I went to write my ps, I literally couldnt stop writing. I purposly went WAY over the limit..like 3 pages...but then I had lots of material to work with edit, revise and trim down.

take a break...go get some coffee, clear ur mind...then just start writing about your life. things youve done. what motivates you to be a doctor. dont worry about how adcoms will think about it..just WRITE what you want to say.

also, dont worry about it being perfectly and ornately written the first time you write it down...its going to be rough and sound weird..but thats where the process of editing and revising and smoothing it over come in nicely!

Good luck, stay sane and I promise you that adcoms will like your essay if its honest and sincere and interesting!

👍

 

[Megalofyia]

I hated writing my personal statement so much. One day I was really frustrated with it and was talking to a friend; in the process of talking to him I said "you know I really wish I could just say ----- cause that's really what I want the schools to know about me and my motivation." My friend said he really liked what I said and after touching it up a bit and making it sound less crude it became the PS I used.

Anyways I know that doesn't help you directly now but you never know when inspiration will hit.

Incidently I kept thinking if I read other people's PSes that it would help me but I think it made it worse cause none of them fit into what I was looking for and they seemed to take words away from me.
It did help a little to go back and read essays I had written for other applications and classes.

 

[Dancing Doctor]

I have trouble with PS, I just can not come up with good stuff.
Anybody up for yet another PS read? Please.... 😉

I don't mind reading it, if you still need someone. However here are the tips that my pre-med advisor gave me (in shortened versions) when I was writing my PS.

The lead or opening paragraph is generally the most important. It is here that you grab the reader's attention or lose it. This paragraph becomes the framework for the rest of the statement. Make sure you explain why you want to be a physician in the first place. What's your motivation, what are your goals, but please don't resort to cliches. Every doctor helps people, so focus on the specific actions that show how you have helped people. Admissions officers have to read hundreds of essays, and they must often skim. Use personal details! "Show don't tell" = relate a personal quality through your experiences. Explain how you have excelled. Make it clear that these are the same qualities that will make you excel as a physician. Address areas of weakness. At some point on your application, you will have an opportunity to explain deficiencies in your record, and you should take advantage of it. Try to spin any negatives into positives. Vary your sentance length, and USE TRANSITION WORDS. Many people try to turn the personal statement into an autobiography, and this rarely works. Make sure that every sentence in your essay exists solely to support your central theme, and cut out unimportant words, paragraphs and sentances. Finally, show your essay to as many people as possible: friends, family, science and english profs, etc. Each of them will provide a different perspective. My mom helped me a lot because she knows me and my personality well and she was able to find ways to allow it to shine in my PS.

These statements are ones that can easily be found through the internet; they are not novel ideas. One needs to be able to stand back from their writing and match it up to these criteria.

Hope that helped.

 

[Buckeye(OH)]

My PS blew ass.

 

[MikeyLu2010]

My PS blew ass.

mine too

 

[yolony]

Cuttinemup said it best.

I went through 13 different versions of my personal statement. The first 12 consisted of me trying to sound too professional and fancy. I used too many cliches and BS statements. I kept rereading it and finding myself very unpleased with the entire structure.

So one day I just sat down (at work nonetheless) and I just started typing. Typing about my childhood, my life growing up and transitioned all the way to the present. Of course it was very rough but I captured a lot of things that I normally wouldn't have written if I actually sat down and thought hard about it.

I got probably the best feedbacks on the *rough* draft, not even the final version. Every person that read it said it was very touching, interesting and most importantly, it showed a personal side of me that most people don't see.

 

[CuttinEmUp]

Cuttinemup said it best.

I went through 13 different versions of my personal statement. The first 12 consisted of me trying to sound too professional and fancy. I used too many cliches and BS statements. I kept rereading it and finding myself very unpleased with the entire structure.

So one day I just sat down (at work nonetheless) and I just started typing. Typing about my childhood, my life growing up and transitioned all the way to the present. Of course it was very rough but I captured a lot of things that I normally wouldn't have written if I actually sat down and thought hard about it.

I got probably the best feedbacks on the *rough* draft, not even the final version. Every person that read it said it was very touching, interesting and most importantly, it showed a personal side of me that most people don't see.

Yep! thats pretty much what happened to me too. Basically what Yolony is saying (and what im saying) is to keep it real! be yourself. be confident about who you are and just tell it like it is.