Hey, I Know You're Having Trouble With your Personal Statements

[8744]

Here are a Few ideas to start you off on your AMCAS personal statements. Feel free to use them:



I had been arrested two weeks before for obstructing logging in the Xocaatl tribe’s ancestral hunting grounds and it was hot in that Mexican jail. Damned hot. The kind of heat that sneaks up behind you and throttles you in manner very similar to that employed by my cell-mate Fernando as he fumbled at his belt while hissing dark Spanish threats into my ear. I think he was warning me not to shout out for the guards, something that I would never do as our personal morality should never be forced on others. Then the pain came. I gritted my teeth and forced back the tears. Homophobia is wrong, I told myself……





His name was Lavon Quintravion Jones, a 24-year-old white male…..





The genital mutilation ritual practiced among the Laconda Tribe in the Peruvian foothills looked painful. And it was. Very, very painful. And as the cermonial dagger was first dipped in the urine of a llama I don’t think it was very sanitary either. Never-the-less I have always thrived in diverse cultures. “We need to celebrate diversity,” I said to the flight medic as the Peruvian Army helicopter airlifted me to the hospital in Lima where emergency surgery would later save most of my penis.

“El ******* más grande en el mundo,” the flight medic said as he adjusted my oxygen mask and I was gratified that he agreed. (I guess my six-day immersion Spanish course was not a waste after all!)…







It’s all about the kittens. I remember my first experience with my pregnant tabby Snowball as the genesis of my desire to be a doctor and my hope to eventually specialize in OB/Gyn. “Hold her still,” I said to my friend Skeeter, "I’m counting parts here and I think we only have enough for five and a half kittens.”

Even then, at the age of twelve, I was strong believer in reproductive freedom for all female mammals…..

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[Tiger26]

Great post all the way around Panda--I love reading your blog btw. The kitten story on the personal statement worked for me, so I think you've really got something there, but those tribe rituals would have definitetly got me into more schools, me thinks.

 

[SanDiegoSOD]

Then the pain came. I gritted my teeth and forced back the tears. Homophobia is wrong, I told myself……

I usually laugh inside when reading these forums... not today. LOL, for real.

 

[BAM!]

When I was nine, I was trapped under the escalator at the local mall for six hours. I don't remeber much about it, just screaming for help and grasping uselessly at the underside of the grated moving steps. I was in a cold metalic nightmare of seclusion, my memory clouded by the screetching of metal and taste of damp feet in my mouth. Towards the end of the sixth hour, I saw a bright light as the jaws of steel pierced its way through the final step, and the physician offered me his oversized calloused hand. I knew then, medicine was my calling...

 

[Jacks Mannequin]

The kind of heat that sneaks up behind you and throttles you in manner very similar to that employed by my cell-mate Fernando as he fumbled at his belt while hissing dark Spanish threats into my ear.

Very nice. I think I'm gonna use this in my PS.

 

[sara3426]

Funny!
But I wonder...
doesn't this man have people to be doctoring somewhere? Isn't he supposed to be a doctor? Put down the haterade, everybody, this is simply an exercise in curiosity.

 

[LizzyM]

When I was nine, I was trapped under the escalator at the local mall for six hours. I don't remeber much about it, just screaming for help and grasping uselessly at the underside of the grated moving steps. I was in a cold metalic nightmare of seclusion, my memory clouded by the screetching of metal and taste of damp feet in my mouth. Towards the end of the sixth hour, I saw a bright light as the jaws of steel pierced its way through the final step, and the firefighter offered me his oversized calloused hand. I knew then, firefighting was my calling...

Ten years later, as a young firefighter, I pulled my grandmother from a burning building. When the doors of the emegency room bay closed behind her, and I saw her fraile frame and thinning white hair caked with soot fade from view, I knew that I wanted to go beyond those doors and to heal those whom I was only rescuing. Thus began my ten year odyssey through junior college, university, post-bach program and volunteer work among the deserving poor children of Kenya to where I am today, at the midpoint of my journey to doctorhood.

 

[red dot]

have you seen that milky way commercial?

"why so blue panda bear? you are a buffet of manliness! *giggles*"

 

[red dot]

before you read this, i want to say, that the essays on this website are just examples. and they're really not that good because it's formulaic. for those of you writing PS's out there, the BEST essay, is the one you come up with yourself in your own prose -- but jammed with as much info about you and why you are a grrrreat candidate for being a doctor. think of it like it's a club you're trying to get into.

http://www.accepted.com/medical/sampessay10.aspx
I felt fortunate to awaken from my weeks-long life-threatening coma in the Zimbabwe orphanage in which I was raised from infancy, until I realized the building was ablaze. After evacuating all the inhabitants including any stray insects who were drawn to the flames, I doused the fire with a water pump I had improvised from an old accordion bellows (on which I often played Bach fugues a la Albert Schweitzer) and a bamboo-like plant I had discovered in the jungle. I named the plant Medusa Abandona after my now forgiven American born mother, who forsook me in my cradle, only after it turned out to be an unknown genus and promised to have exciting anti-cancer medicinal qualities as well. When I was convinced that everyone in the orphanage was safe, I escaped the holocaust in the solar powered wheel chair I had developed to give myself more mobility after the unfortunate accident I had as a child, breaking my seventh vertebra while wrestling a lion that had terrorized the village.

When I was seven, the only doctor within a 300 mile radius took me under his wing. I shadowed him for ten years, which was quite difficult when you consider the dense jungle foliage and lack of sunlight at ground level. The fact that he was a witch doctor should in no way denigrate his skills nor the efficacy of his spells. If you accept me into your next medical class, I intend to teach my fellow students a series of hexes that will eliminate the need for Viagra, Allegra, Grecian Formula and Formula 409.

Most of my adolescence I spent draining swamps, eliminating mosquitoes and generally reducing the malarial plague in three contiguous countries in equatorial Africa. It was only after saving the lives of ten's of thousands of people that I decided to become a doctor in hope that over the course of my career I might be able to save just a few more. The journey to medicine was difficult. It was a choice between being a doctor and being a shoemaker, but after I taught everyone in my village how to make their own shoes there was no need to pursue this noble profession.

Harvard was reluctant to let me go after I got straight "A"s as the first graduate in their new correspondence bachelors degree program but with five majors and 12 books to my credit they finally acknowledged (see attached letter) that they had nothing left to teach me. My economics honors thesis was entitled "Grade Inflation at Harvard: The Great Hoax."

Given my academic prowess, imagine then how mortified I was to receive only a 44 aggregate AMCAS score. Those of you at AMCAS reading this, who may have contributed to writing the April exam, should be ashamed of yourselves. In the passage on "Halitosis" you referred to the sufferer as having "bad breadth". The patient could certainly be circumferentially challenged but I assumed a typo had been committed and that you meant he had "bad breath" and answered accordingly. My fellow hapless examinees' incorrect answers to question 39 should be stricken and the exam be recalibrated accordingly.

In short, becoming a doctor may seem humdrum and a come down compared to my life so far, but I am willing to unlearn a few things so I won't be so far ahead of my fellow medical classmates. And don't worry about my disability; I can still perform an angioplasty and thread several needles while doing 500 one-armed finger pushups.


that one of course, is fake. but here's a real one from my collection. it's quite ballsy:

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently.

Occasionally, I tread water to three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I am bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy eveningwear. I do not perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400.

My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.

I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed on Broadway, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to medical school.

by the way, i've seen PSs that used only HALF of the character count, and they were REALLY fabulous. but since i tend to be really wordy, i used up almost all of my characters. anyway, just make it worth their while to read... i kind of regret that mine was a little formulaic, because that's not how i am as a person, and i think i might have fared slightly better during the app process had i written my PS in a prose more like my own. but then again, i did about 4 different PSs and 7-15 drafts of each, so don't listen to me. i was a mess trying to write that stuff...

 

[CardiacIntensivist]

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently.

Occasionally, I tread water to three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I am bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy eveningwear. I do not perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400.

My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.

I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed on Broadway, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to medical school.

Where did you get this one? I saw this same essay 5 years ago in high school except it ended in "But I have not yet gone to college." I can't remember the author's name but supposedly it got him accepted in to NYU undergrad.

 

[8744]

Funny!
But I wonder...
doesn't this man have people to be doctoring somewhere? Isn't he supposed to be a doctor? Put down the haterade, everybody, this is simply an exercise in curiosity.

Young lady, I am indeed a physician and am, as of yesterday, finished with my intern year at Duke. I was in family practice but as my personality is somewhat unsuited to that specialty I managed to match into Emergency Medicine this year and will soon start a little something I like to call "Intern Year II, Better, Stronger, Faster."

It's academic, actually, because as you may have heard the Family Medicine residency program at Duke is now, in the words of the Italian porn star at the end of his scene, finito. Disbanded, I mean, although they are going to let the current residents finish their training if they so choose.

I used to have the time to write long posts on many subjects but now I confine myself to a little easy sarcasm and light humor.

 

[Avalanche21]

This stuff is great. If only I had seen this before I wrote mine